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this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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docx files are actually zip archives with xml in them
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.
If you are, like I once was, the poor fool who has to maintain a bunch of VBA macros... Extract them into files and source control those. Make a script to extract them and to put them back, and use git-lfs for the actual workbook if you need a template workbook.
Now pardon me, I need to add this to the agenda for my next therapy.
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.
Perhaps M$ does that specifically to make it hard to work with their formats? That way, tools like libre office stay not 100% compatible, preserving their market share.
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.
Just fork git to handle zipping, formatting and ignoring metadata! Or just put your office document in the cloud and use the basic versioning it provides.