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by cogman10 587 days ago
Would probably still work. There's just too many formats which makes it very hard for a content blocker to really stop.

I pity the programmer that has to decode the 1000 versions of xls to find the binary blob that could be a virus.
1 comments
telgareith 586 days ago
1000? No. There's two. Openxml and the original xls. OpenXML can be scanned for issues like any other XML file.

Alas, it's more difficult to get excel to accept that it shouldn't delete leading zeros than it is to check a spreadsheet's sus-o-scale.

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cogman10 586 days ago
1000 is an over exaggeration, but it is not just 2 standards.

xls morphed with every version of Microsoft Excel. MS Excel has pretty good backwards compatibility, but making an xls parser is notoriously hard because of the many differences between versions.

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