Actually - there are three different file formats in Excel 2007. Episode 403 describes the differences and shows you how you can use a zip utility to take a look inside the new file format.
This blog is the video netcast companion to the upcoming book, Excel 2007 Miracles Made Easy. Download a new two minute video every Tuesday and Thursday to learn one of the tips from the book!
This blog is the video netcast companion to the upcoming book, Excel 2007 Miracles Made Easy. Download a new two minute video every Tuesday and Thursday to learn one of the tips from the book!
Transcript of the video:
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast, I'm Bill Jelen.
It's another 2007 Thursday, on Tuesday I started to talk about the brand new Excel and the 1.1 million rows 16000 columns, and talked about how to use Save As to convert the file.
When I did that, I mentioned that there's three new file formats, and I figure I should probably, kind of give you a brief overview of what that's all about.
In every version of Excel dating back to the beginning, they always save the file as a binary format.
If you actually open that file in a text editor, you'd see lots of strange characters.
And a problem with a binary format is that when a few cells went bad, the whole workbook would become corrupt.
Now the default version is something called an Excel Workbook, where everything is stored as XML.
XML is an open format, it's actually text-based, and I'm going to show you inside the format later.
And so if you save a file as an Excel Workbook, it'll be saved as an XLSX format, which is the XML format.
There's also an XLSM, this is explicitly an XML workbook that allows you to have macros in the workbook.
This is kind of another security protection that you can tell whether or not the file has macros or not.
So I am actually recommending that you either use XLSM if you're a macro person or just the XLSX.
Several advantages of that, and let's take a look at the file that we saved in Tuesday's podcasts, the “Tips and Tricks.xlsm”.
The first thing you'll notice here in Windows Explorer is the file size, shortened from 221k down to 92k, that's fantastic!
Now, here's a real trick, I'm going to take this file in Explorer, and I'm going to rename it.
I'm going to change the file extension from xlsm to a zip file, it warns me, I say Yes.
Now if I open this with WinZip, you'll see that we can actually see all of the components inside the workbook, here's sheet1.xml, sheet2.xml, sheet3.xml.
And if I would open this, we can actually take a look at every cell right in the worksheet.
This means that if your program has a text editor, you can actually, if you're patient enough, go out and write a new Excel workbook from scratch.
Or go in and edit something in an existing Excel Workbook, opens up an incredible amount of possibilities.
Hey, there you have it, talking about the three new file formats in Excel, two of which are XML-based formats, makes the file a lot smaller.
There's always a chance that some few bits get corrupt, the rest of the XML can still be read, and most of your workbook will be recovered.
Thanks for stopping by, we'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel!
It's another 2007 Thursday, on Tuesday I started to talk about the brand new Excel and the 1.1 million rows 16000 columns, and talked about how to use Save As to convert the file.
When I did that, I mentioned that there's three new file formats, and I figure I should probably, kind of give you a brief overview of what that's all about.
In every version of Excel dating back to the beginning, they always save the file as a binary format.
If you actually open that file in a text editor, you'd see lots of strange characters.
And a problem with a binary format is that when a few cells went bad, the whole workbook would become corrupt.
Now the default version is something called an Excel Workbook, where everything is stored as XML.
XML is an open format, it's actually text-based, and I'm going to show you inside the format later.
And so if you save a file as an Excel Workbook, it'll be saved as an XLSX format, which is the XML format.
There's also an XLSM, this is explicitly an XML workbook that allows you to have macros in the workbook.
This is kind of another security protection that you can tell whether or not the file has macros or not.
So I am actually recommending that you either use XLSM if you're a macro person or just the XLSX.
Several advantages of that, and let's take a look at the file that we saved in Tuesday's podcasts, the “Tips and Tricks.xlsm”.
The first thing you'll notice here in Windows Explorer is the file size, shortened from 221k down to 92k, that's fantastic!
Now, here's a real trick, I'm going to take this file in Explorer, and I'm going to rename it.
I'm going to change the file extension from xlsm to a zip file, it warns me, I say Yes.
Now if I open this with WinZip, you'll see that we can actually see all of the components inside the workbook, here's sheet1.xml, sheet2.xml, sheet3.xml.
And if I would open this, we can actually take a look at every cell right in the worksheet.
This means that if your program has a text editor, you can actually, if you're patient enough, go out and write a new Excel workbook from scratch.
Or go in and edit something in an existing Excel Workbook, opens up an incredible amount of possibilities.
Hey, there you have it, talking about the three new file formats in Excel, two of which are XML-based formats, makes the file a lot smaller.
There's always a chance that some few bits get corrupt, the rest of the XML can still be read, and most of your workbook will be recovered.
Thanks for stopping by, we'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel!
