LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Adam Smith <adam.smith@sageautomation.com>
  To  : <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 11:50:31 +0930

RE: Open Office 1.0 - was [OT] Bitchin about M$

> What does impress me is the difference in filesizes.  I 
> converted about 20 or so spreadsheets yesterday, the smallest 
> in xls format was 930k, on average by saving them all in sxc 
> format the files were about 70% smaller than the equivalent 
> excel file.  And none of them had any obvious difference in 
> functionality, not that I could find anyway.  

This could be something to do with versioning -- I believe Word
Documents and Excel Spreadsheets etc keep hoardes and hoardes of data in
them relating to changes that have been made within the document and
that sort of thing.  I couldn't tell you exactly what it is, just that
Microsoft file format files have always been bloated and overloaded with
unnecessary data.  It's a bit of a shame they never implemented
something like a "Blow Away Data" option on the file menu, to bring back
the spreadsheet to the size it should be, and irradiate all the crap
that has been filled within it.

There have been times where I have found .xls files on our network that
are 6Mb or so in size, and apparently containing very little data (no
macros or any other such stuff).  Converting them to a previous version
of Excel reduces their size to normal and then if necessary, reupgrading
them to their normal version will bring them back to normal.

I don't think small file sizes is something to marvel at, it's just that
with Microsoft leading the consumers with MSOffice, it's not surprising
we're just used to seeing file sizes of gigantic proportions.

There are a great many things that could be added to a list just to
prove _why_ Microsoft software is not as professional as the consumer
thinks :-)



--
Adam Smith
IT Officer
SAGE Automation Ltd

adam.smith@sageautomation.com
http://www.sageautomation.com

Phone:   (08) 8276 0703
Fax:     (08) 8276 0799
Mobile:  0414 895 273

"Computers are like air-conditioners; they don't work when you open
Windows."


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