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XLSB - answer follow-up from yesterday's webcast
Hi, all! Many thanks for Jon Peltier, Excel MVP, for this info.
XLSB is an Excel 2007 file format (allows you to save data in the additional rows and columns that are available in Excel 2007, for example) -- it's just a binary format rather than strictly XML (meaning - as further detailed below, that it still contains quite a bit of the Open XML formats within its structure). So it is different from saving in the legacy format (that is, the XLS format used in Office 97-2003).
(For reference - the old file formats contained a max of 65536 rows and 256 columns ... the new Excel file formats support up to 16,384 columns and 1,048,576 rows. Very cool :)
The idea is that the binary file format (xlsb) allows files to open and close more quickly ... which can be particularly important to Excel since it is often used more heavily in custom solution development than the other Office programs that have the new file formats -- (for example, many solutions need to run Excel in the background, opening and closing files without the user ever needing to know). (Note that the difference in speed is unlikely to be something that we as end-users would typically notice in our day-to-day work ... in case you're wondering why they wouldn't do this for Word and PowerPoint as well.)
... I played around a bit and found that you can still change the file extension on an xlsb file to zip and open the zip package as you can with the other file types using the new Open XML format. The xlsb binary files still contain the core XML of the other new file formats that we looked at in the webcast yesterday (the top-level _rels, docprops, and xl folders, for example - as well as xml files in the xl content for 2007-specific formatting such as themes). However, when you drill down into the xl folder to the worksheets folder, you'll see binary (.bin) files for the worksheet content rather than xml files. Very interesting for anyone who has a chance to check it out ...
Thanks again for the info, Jon! ... and happy weekend to all!
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