XLSB - A binary file

[pedie]

I personally never used this format, however I tried saving data in this format XLSB [A binary file] it consumes lesser space....

Why is that so? Just curious, is this some kind of special format?, i tried referring to few of the links but makes no much sense...
John W states, "With the exception of XLSB, these are all open XML file formats, which means that other applications

can read and write these types of files.​

​

​

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The XML files are ZIP-compressed text files. If you rename one of these files so that it has a ZIP extension, you can examine the contents by using any of several ZIP file utilities — including the ZIP file support built into Windows.​

".

 

[xenou]

More info here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338205(v=office.12).aspx

Short answer (my take):
The new file formats (xml-based and the binary xlsb format) are all compressed file formats. So they are all smaller files now - even the xlsb file is a compressed zip archive under the hood. The xml-based formats are geared towards open standards and to facilitate communication between systems.

If you know anything about xml it has a lot of tags in it (opening tags and closing tags for all elements). So the xml formats should be larger than the binary format, all things being equal - possibly about 1.5 times larger on average. But both xlsx and xlsb are still much smaller than the old xls binary files. I believe that large xlsb's will open a little faster, but otherwise expect xlsb to perform about on par with xlsx in most cases (I could be wrong - that's how I remember it when I was looking into this some months ago).

 

[pedie]

Xen, thanks for the info. and the link you provided...I have no much idea [not at all] about xml, however yea....it makes more sense hearing from you


Xen, thanks again....the link has good information....i'm sure other users also will benefit from it...