Microsoft KB Archive/239653

= INFO: Support for the Microsoft Office Binary File Formats =

PSS ID Number: 239653

Article Last Modified on 2/2/2004

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The information in this article applies to:


 * Microsoft Excel 2000
 * Microsoft Access 97
 * Microsoft Excel 97 for Windows
 * Microsoft PowerPoint 97 for Windows
 * Microsoft Word 97 for Windows
 * Microsoft Access 2000
 * Microsoft PowerPoint 2000
 * Microsoft Word 2000
 * Microsoft Excel 2002
 * Microsoft Word 2002
 * Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
 * Microsoft Access 2002
 * Microsoft Office 2000
 * Microsoft Office XP

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This article was previously published under Q239653



SUMMARY
This article describes the availability of support for the Microsoft Office file formats.



Microsoft Excel
The Microsoft Excel Binary file format is supported for Microsoft Excel versions 5.0 and later. There is a helpful tool for analyzing the contents of Microsoft Excel files called BiffView.exe that comes with the Microsoft Excel SDK listed in the "References" section of this article. For additional information about Microsoft Excel binary file format, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

178605 HOWTO: Determine the Version of a Microsoft Excel Workbook

147732 Records Needed to Make a BIFF5 File Microsoft Excel Can Use

187919 INFO: BIFF8 BOUNDSHEET Record Data for Uncompressed Unicode

Microsoft Word
Microsoft does not provide technical support, or any other type of support for the Microsoft Word binary file format. For additional information about MicrosoftWord binary file format, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

174140 HOWTO: Determine the Version of a Microsoft Word Document

Microsoft PowerPoint
Microsoft does not provide technical support, or any other type of support for the Microsoft PowerPoint binary file format.

Microsoft Access
The Microsoft Access binary file format is proprietary. It is neither documented nor supported.

Microsoft Binder
Microsoft does not provide technical or any other type of support for the Microsoft Binder binary file format.

Microsoft Office 97 Drawing File Format
Microsoft does not provide technical support, or any other type of support for the Microsoft Drawing binary file format.

Additional Information
All of the applications, except Microsoft Access, save their data using structured storage. A lot of useful information, independent of the specific application's file format in question, can be gathered by parsing the structured storage. An example of this type of information is document properties.

For additional information about file formats, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

186898 HOWTO: Read Compound Document Properties Directly with VC++

224351 FILE: DSOFILE.EXE Lets You Read Document Properties w/o Office

NOTE: The Microsoft Office binary file format documentation was removed from the MSDN in 1999. If you would like to receive this documentation, you can send e-mail to officeff@microsoft.com, or mail to:

Office File Format Documentation Request

One Microsoft Way

Redmond, WA 98052

Requests should contain a detailed description for planned use of this documentation.

Microsoft Office 2000 supports HTML/XML as a native file format. The documentation is provided on the MSDN under "Microsoft Office HTML and XML Reference." You can find this at the following Web site:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnoffxml/html/ofxml2k.asp

