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References

Some of our original research is documented at https://oss.sheetjs.com/notes/

The specifications list is non-exhaustive.

  • Worksheet File Format (From Lotus) December 1984
  • Open Document Format for Office Applications Version 1.3
info

The primary specifications for XLSX are:

  • ISO/IEC 29500 "Information technology — Document description and processing languages — Office Open XML File Formats"
  • ECMA-376 "Office Open XML file formats"

As some editions of ECMA-376 are identical to ISO specification editions, most of the public XLSX document community use the spec names interchangeably.

Open Specifications Promise​

Lotus released their "Worksheet File Format" documentation into the Public Domain. Microsoft opted for the "Open Specifications Promise", a covenant not to sue. The documentation that falls under the promise are listed below.

Specifications (click to show)
  • MS-CFB: Compound File Binary File Format
  • MS-CTXLS: Excel Custom Toolbar Binary File Format
  • MS-EXSPXML3: Excel Calculation Version 2 Web Service XML Schema
  • MS-ODATA: Open Data Protocol (OData)
  • MS-ODRAW: Office Drawing Binary File Format
  • MS-ODRAWXML: Office Drawing Extensions to Office Open XML Structure
  • MS-OE376: Office Implementation Information for ECMA-376 Standards Support
  • MS-OFFCRYPTO: Office Document Cryptography Structure
  • MS-OI29500: Office Implementation Information for ISO/IEC 29500 Standards Support
  • MS-OLEDS: Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) Data Structures
  • MS-OLEPS: Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) Property Set Data Structures
  • MS-OODF3: Office Implementation Information for ODF 1.2 Standards Support
  • MS-OSHARED: Office Common Data Types and Objects Structures
  • MS-OVBA: Office VBA File Format Structure
  • MS-XLDM: Spreadsheet Data Model File Format
  • MS-XLS: Excel Binary File Format (.xls) Structure Specification
  • MS-XLSB: Excel (.xlsb) Binary File Format
  • MS-XLSX: Excel (.xlsx) Extensions to the Office Open XML SpreadsheetML File Format
  • XLS: Microsoft Office Excel 97-2007 Binary File Format Specification
  • RTF: Rich Text Format

Other Resources​

  • ISBN 1556155212 "Excel Software Development Kit Version 4"
  • ISBN 1556156324 "Excel Developer's Kit Version 5"