Excel file types

Is there any advantage to using the XML vs the binay format?  It seems Microsoft wants the defaults to be xlsx and xlsm, but I see two distinct advantages to using the xlsb binary format.  One, it's less confusing to always use xlsb than to use xlsx for normal workbooks and xlsm for macro workbooks.   I don't understand the need to distinguish the two by filetypes in the first place.  The macro security settings are good enough that you don't need to know if it's a macro workbook or not by the filetype.  Two, the files are significantly smaller.  I haven't timed it, but I think they open and save faster too.

So why should I use the XML format? Is anyone really accessing Office documents from outside of the Office environment?  I just can't think of a good reason that I'd want to write a tool just to parse data out of a spreadsheet I created in XML.

zfraile

That's an interesting topic and sometimes you have to wonder. I can tell you though that categorically, the binary file format is optimised for speed of opening and calculation.

The VB project in both file types are held in a binary format anyhow for security reasons.

Certainly I've not done any interrogating of the files inside the zip (all file formats are zip archives) and I imagine it would be rare, but I suppose you could argue it at least has a degree of 'openess' to do so.

What I have had success with in the xml type file is recovering a corrupt workbook, by looking at folders in the zip and removing some. It can be a bit 'hit and miss' as the _rels (relationship files) are very intertwined, but I had one with a corrupted chart and I manged to remove the chart part of the file and save the rest. it actually recovered itself after deleting the chart and then allowing the error to happen that the file was not in a correct format and would I like Excel to attempt a recovery? That worked.

Maybe it will have more uses in the future???

The xml format is useful as well if you need to be able to have other software make changes/additions to them. A good example would be a (web)server that produces Excel format reports. You can have it update xml parts relatively easy to e.g. add rows to a sheet.

Jan Karel Pieterse:

The xml format is useful as well if you need to be able to have other software make changes/additions to them. A good example would be a (web)server that produces Excel format reports. You can have it update xml parts relatively easy to e.g. add rows to a sheet.

That begs a different question, which is who is actually doing that kind of stuff in Excel?  I've worked with companies of 6 to companies of 20,000 and neither one of them ever did anything as far as data sharing within Excel.  The whole group sharing and sharepoint and all that stuff was never used.  I think the only external data access ever performed was probably by me when I added some VB code and a ADO reference to query a SQL database.

Granted there have been programs that generated Excel files as their output, but that's always been the 2003 file format. Whether they built it from scratch or just automated Excel, I don't know, but that's still not the same as this XML stuff.

I just have the feeling that this whole XML file format is just a concession by Microsoft to all the people clamoring for an open standard.  But why cripple the 99% of users who will never do anything with an Excel file but open it in Excel to cater to the desires of the other 1%?  Fine, have an XML format if it's so important, but why make it the default?

I think Microsoft’s move to XML has less to do with making the Open Source loonies happy, and more to do with making a full fidelity Office suite for the web. That is, open XML is a step toward a web-based Office suite of tools.