Microsoft Excel Workbook (XP-2003), Microsoft Excel Workbook (2002-2003)
Identifiers
MIME:
application/vnd.ms-excel Apple Uniform Type Identifier:
com.microsoft.excel.xls PUID:
fmt/62
Family
Classification
Spreadsheet
Disclosure
None
Description
The Binary Interchange File Format (BIFF) is a spreadsheet file format developed by Microsoft. BIFF 8X is a native file format of Microsoft Excel XP. The format is proprietary and Microsoft does not make details of its structure public. The information here is derived primarily from OpenOffice.org's reverse-engineered documentation of the format and should not therefore be regarded as definitive. BIFF 8X is based on Microsoft’s generic OLE2 Compound Document Format. An Excel workbook is stored as a ‘Book’ stream within a Compound Document Format file. The Book stream comprises a Workbook Globals Substream, containing a Beginning of File (BOF) record, the Workbook global records, and terminated by an End of File (EOF) record. This is followed by one or more Worksheet substreams, containing a Beginning of File (BOF) record, the worksheet records, and terminated by an End of File (EOF) record. The format remained unchanged with the release of Excel 2003.