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I was today years old when I realized I could unzip with 7zip a excel, word, ppt files. Which then lead me down a rabbit hole of finding other OLE type files.. altium schematic files, brd files etc

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  • 3
    It's a common thing to compress binary files with deflate compression. That way you don't need to encode the data in a special way to make it space efficient
  • 4
    @iiii totally understood, but like idk why I never investigated MS office files .. I just took them at face value binary files nothing more lol 😂
  • 5
    @QuanticoCEO the old doc format was not like that, btw. It was a true binary format.
  • 6
    Epub is also a bunch of compressed XMLs in a package 😉
  • 2
    @iiii good to know, that’s what’s behind the MSoffice files, it’s all compressed xml
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    @QuanticoCEO yeah, and I think it's quite a clever design actually
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    @iiii ahh that would make sense and might explain my preconceived notions thinking it was just a plain old binary
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    @iiii Yeah, the old format is much older than compression tools like deflate so it implements its own methods for efficiently encoding text to binary data.
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    @iiii Also common to remove lost passwords from that excel you only need to update once every 5 years.

    Disclaimer : I don't know how that works
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