On Wed, 2005-11-02 at 11:15 -0700, Robin Laing wrote: > But I have yet to find a way to open excel files in anything but excel > or OOo. At least with ODF I can open the file in EMACS or VIM or ... > > I can write other programs to access the data that don't require me to > have to purchase a restrictive license from Microsoft.
And even if it was impossible for OOo to open massive spreadsheets instantly because it had to parse XML it could be provided with a binary format to save in for development so this would be more or less instant and then have ODF for sharing with other apps if this is important. The fact is that if MS adopts XML as its native format it too will have to parse XML files so its likely to be slower than .xls. Speed never bothered MS too much in the past so I doubt it will bother them now. Their attitude will be upgrade to the latest hardware (and therefore buy a new OEM Windows license ;-) No doubt some suckers think this type of forced upgrade is a good idea) > Also I know that the files will open on Mac, Windows or Linux. I > cannot say that about Excel. Heck, I have yet to see a version of > Excel for Linux. Do you have a link? > > Of course this is an extreme case. This was a situation designed to > test a very large spreadsheet. About 16 times larger than anything I > have ever used in the past or see myself using in the future. My > normal spreadsheet takes less than 9 sec to load and display all the > graphs. Yes a trade off between the benefits of XML against the draw backs clearly hasn't been lost on MS otherwise they would not be adopting a new XML format in office12. For the vast majority of people in normal work it will not be too much of a problem but its will be still working to improve performance anyway. -- Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ZMSL --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
