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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • petersr@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzLPT Do it.
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    5 months ago

    I hear ya. But to be honest, what they are doing here is fine, and doesn’t seem malicious. There is an Open Document specification and they stick to it, but the spec doesn’t enforce everything. For instance for the ordering of certain elements on the page, I bet you they store store those elements in memory in an efficient data structure where ordering doesn’t matter, so when writing out the memory to disk, the easiest for them to do is just write it out in what order it appears in their data structure.

    But there are probably other cases where they are not so innocent.


  • petersr@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzLPT Do it.
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    5 months ago

    I will join that therapy session. This is pretty much what we did, except LFS, since it was “a requirement” to also track what they layouting of the Excel file was like.

    And even extracting and inserting the code was not stable. Excel will arbitrarily change the casing of “.path” to “.Path” for no reason and add and remove whitespace between functions as it see fit. It was such a pain. We also had a hard time handling unicode strings for instance containing a degree sign. And the list goes on.



  • petersr@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzLPT Do it.
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    5 months ago

    Let me tell you something. I cannot tell you what company, but I have been tasked with putting Excel files in git “because they are just zip archives with xml” and it is just a disaster. Everytime you save the document it will save certain parts of the xml code in arbitrary ways (like each image is in a list and the order of that list is random everytime), some metadata is re-written everytime like time of last modified and finally all the xml files are one single line. The git diffs are complete useless and noisy and just looking at the Excel file will cause git to consider it updated. So sure, you can use git to snapshot you Office documents… But just don’t.