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Except that it's proprietary and will eventually be un-maintained and stop working. But spreadsheets, in general, fall under the Lindy effect and open source software will continue it for centuries to come.


Although excel spreadsheets have had more longevity than lots of other formats…


You might have had a point in the days of .xls, but Excel by default uses .xlsx now which is just XML packaged inside a .zip archive if I recall.

And yes, Excel still fully supports .xls too.

I fear whatever format LibreOffice uses will die first, case in point I don't even remember what it's called even though I should as a computer nerd.


MS-OOXML is barely an open format. Have you tried implementing it? ECMA-376 part 1 is over 5000 pages, and there are four parts to it! (Part 1 contains an extra bit about SpreadsheetML, but by that point we were two zips deep. I turned back ere I got lost.)

The OpenDocument formats, meanwhile, are older, simpler and better than their MS-OOXML equivalents. (The ODF spec is 1041 pages altogether – 215 pages of that are the spreadsheet formula language.) LibreOffice's implementation is a little janky, sure, but I can edit OpenDocument files by hand. Try doing that to a MS-OOXML file. (Good luck.)


Its easier for me to imagine a world in which AI makes spreadsheets invisible to the modern person than it is to imagine a world in which Excel isn't the de facto spreadsheet.




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