Desktop Office results for 1.0

What desktop Word, Excel and PowerPoint did with OneDocument's output, and what OneDocument got wrong or right against them. The oracle drives the applications through COM from a scheduled task in a signed-in user session (tools/office-oracle); only files we generated were sent. Nothing here is copied from Office: every row is a file, an outcome or a number that came back.

The run

Two failure shapes show up in the tables and are told apart by experiment, not by guess: an input problem (the file is damaged or hand-written wrongly: Excel and Word fail on the source the same way) and a defect (our writer produced it; fixed, or open).

Verdicts first

1. No repair prompt for the writers' outputs

Word and PowerPoint report a file that needs repair as repair-prompt (opening it as it is fails, opening with repair succeeds) or unreadable; Excel reports an open failure. Every failure was bisected (part swaps, element removal, schema validation) before it was called a defect.

Defects found and fixed in this run (each has a test):

1. ODF packages: Word rejected the mimetype entry. Our entry had "version needed to extract" 0; Word's OpenDocument reader treats that as damage (all four ODTs needed repair, LibreOffice's own ODT did not). The entry now says 20 (OdfPackage). Bisected by rewriting the same bytes with the version field patched in one place.
2. PPT → PPTX: slide masters carried subTitle and ctrTitle placeholders. PowerPoint refuses a master with anything but title, body, date, footer and slide number placeholders (PptShapeWriter: master placeholders are mapped to those).
3. ODP → PPTX: adjust values were named adj1, adj2… for every preset. A roundRect has adj, a star5 has adj, hf, vf; PowerPoint refuses a guide the preset does not declare. The names now come from the preset's own definition (tools/DrawingPresets/adjust-names.py generates PresetAdjustNames.g.cs).
4. XLS notes: Excel refused every BIFF8 workbook we wrote with cell notes. Fixed. Cause, found by swapping record groups between our file and a workbook LibreOffice wrote from the same cells (both are black-box files; the swap tool rewrites the compound file): the MsoDrawing records carried the right shapes, but the lengths declared by each note's shape container, its group container and the drawing container did not count the eight-byte text box marker that follows in the next record. Swapping only the MsoDrawing records made Excel open the file; the Obj, TxO, Note records and the drawing group were not at fault. The containers now count the marker; the note shape also carries the property set other writers use, the drawing group's spidMax is the last shape identifier and Obj starts with flags 0 (XlsWriter.Drawing, tested by HyperlinksAndNotesSurviveAWriteAndRead).
5. xls-features.ods and the six ODS written from the XLSX templates do not open in Excel; information, not a gate. The ODF gate is the RelaxNG schemas and LibreOffice: all eleven ODS files written in this run validate against ODF 1.3 (Jing, extension namespaces ignored, 0 failures) and LibreOffice opens them. Excel's OpenDocument reader refuses them (and LibreOffice's own ods-rich.ods); they were not bisected.

Input problems (the source fails the same way, or fails the schema), kept here so nobody chases them: the PPTX notes templates notes-text and slide-per-item-with-notes (a notes master with no transform on the slide image placeholder shares nothing with the slide master's theme; their unrendered template.pptx fail identically); the three XLSX templates with dxfId but no dxfs (cf-and-validation, cf-rule-formula, sheet-copy-features: the unrendered templates fail identically); the mail-merge template single-document (a drawing with urn:x content); layout probes drawing-fills, drawing-effects-groups, float-wrap-through-ellipse-no-polygon, drawing-slide-shapes, slide-pictures-charts-diagrams, x12-first-odd-even (schema failures in hand-written DrawingML, a connector style without children, header and footer order) and 126-footnote-reference-to-missing-note (damaged on purpose); the XLSB probe workbooks whose table covers cells that do not exist (xlsb-features, xlsb-formulas; removing tableParts makes the converted workbook open); the test report report.docx of the HTML cases (hand-written picture markup); lo-slide-backgrounds.odp and lo-roundtrip.docm, which LibreOffice wrote and PowerPoint and Word refuse. Six ODS written from the XLSX templates fail in Excel, and so does LibreOffice's own ods-rich.ods; not bisected, so they are not counted as defects.

2. Excel grids

Excel entered each formula with Formula2 (dynamic-array semantics), recalculated fully and returned the entered text, the spill shape and every value; FunctionGrid fill, FormulaGrid compare and LookupGrid compare evaluate the same text with the engine. Numbers agree to 15 significant digits; text, booleans and errors exactly (errors by kind). The Excel answers are committed beside the inputs (testdata/calc/function-grid/*.expected.tsv, function-grids/*.fgrid.tsv, lookup-grid/*.fgrid.tsv) and every disagreement is listed in the mismatches.txt of its directory. Floors (rows compared / disagree; they only rise):

What the disagreements are (the lists are committed; this is the shape, not an excuse for each row):

• Lookup. The first run disagreed on 1,350 rows, 1,302 of them XMATCH and MATCH on unsorted or mixed-type data. They were settled from the committed answers (the rules are in docs/calc-functions.md, open item 1) and the grid was compared again without asking Excel anything new: XMATCH binary modes bisect across types (numbers, text, logical values, errors, an equal probe is kept and the search goes on towards the start when ascending); next-smaller and next-larger compare across types and an empty needle sorts above everything; legacy approximate lookups step up to a cell of the target's type and take the last of an equal run; MATCH type -1 over a short array is a linear read (all 1,388 MATCH rows with literal arrays agree). The question mark sorts after the asterisk in text order. What is left (47 rows) is not a search: GROUPBY/PIVOTBY shapes (9), RANDARRAY (5, volatile), reference-function edge cases (INDEX, ROW, COLUMN, ROWS, COLUMNS, ADDRESS, OFFSET, INDIRECT, HYPERLINK, SUM(B1:.E8)), LAMBDA/LET/MAP error kinds and shape rows of FILTER, SORTBY, TAKE, EXPAND, WRAPROWS, MAKEARRAY. Open: MATCH type -1 beyond 64 cells is bisected, as no grid case is that long. Fixed here: VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP looked at the column index before searching; Excel searches first, so a value that is not found is #N/A whatever the index (335 rows before the change, now 0).
• Function grid. Statistical distribution inverses and discrete distributions on boundary arguments (NEGBINOM.DIST, BINOM.INV, HYPGEOM.DIST, F.INV.RT, T.DIST, WEIBULL, POISSON.DIST: Excel's iteration limits and accepted ranges), text conversions (TEXT formats, NUMBERVALUE, TEXTSPLIT, TEXTBEFORE/TEXTAFTER), SERIESSUM, TIME, EOMONTH/EDATE on edge dates, LINEST/LOGEST shape, GCD/LCM, MROUND, RANDBETWEEN/RANDARRAY (volatile, no stable value) and 16 service-bound rows (DETECTLANGUAGE and similar: Excel answered over the network, the engine evaluates offline by design).
• Financial and engineering. Of 342 rows, 134 are values that differ (coupon-date family COUPDAYS, COUPNCD, PRICE, YIELD, ODDF*/ODDL* on basis and boundary dates; RATE, IRR, XIRR iteration; Bessel functions, complex-number functions IMCOT, IMTAN, IMCSC), the rest are error-kind differences on out-of-range arguments (BIN2DEC, DEC2BIN and the base conversions: Excel's #NUM! limits). Database. The driver now enters a NAME.cells.tsv sidecar before the formulas, and the first run disagreed on 38 of 324 rows: a boolean field (TRUE names the first column), DCOUNT/DCOUNTA with the field left out (they count the matching records), and a criteria block of one row or a single value (#VALUE!). Fixed; 0 disagree now.

The harness fix that made the financial and engineering numbers meaningful: FormulaGrid compare now knows Excel's error numbers (-2146826288 + (code - 2000)) without error literals in the grid (before it, 1,047 rows showed as "unknown code").

3. Layout differential (page count, line breaks, geometry)

Both sides exported PDFs; LayoutProbe's text-line comparison and tools/office-oracle/layout-geometry.py (every word of Word's PDF paired with the nearest word of ours with the same text; it agrees when left edge and baseline are within 2 pt) read them. Page counts agree on all 196 documents and workbooks and on all 24 decks. Floors for the rows where both sides used the same fonts:

Fixed from this differential (each observed in Word, each with a test):

• Paragraph spacing is the larger of space after and space before, not their sum, in every compatibility mode (six pairs measured; was additive).
• A multiple of line spacing above 1 adds its room below the text: the first line of 1.5 spacing sits where single spacing puts it (was above).
• Space before is kept at the top of the first page of a section that starts a page (it was dropped, as after a natural break).
• A decimal tab aligns on the point, not on a group comma (1,234.56).
• Table cell margin is 0 when the document has no default table style (the 108 twips come from "Normal Table"); the layout test documents now carry that style as Word documents do.
• A footnote position in the document settings is not applied; only a section's own is (Word left the note at the page bottom).

Differences that remain, explained, not fixed:

• Sheets: Word's PDF of a sheet puts rows 14.52 pt apart where our default row is 15 pt (the default row height follows the display scaling of the machine), so geometry drifts down the page while line breaks and page counts agree. Geometry is information for sheets.
• Fields: Word exports the stored results of a table of contents and index; layout updates fields by default, so 100–102, 111 differ until LayoutOptions.UpdateFields is off.
• Tab leaders are drawn as shapes in our PDF and as dot characters in Word's (07-leaders line text); a right tab with a second tab past the margin keeps the text on the margin line in Word and wraps it in ours (06-tabs).
• Tables with their own cell margin or cell spacing start their first text up to 3.5 pt away from Word's (tbl-06, tbl-04, tbl-14, tbl-18); with a default table style Word pulls the table out by the style margin, with a direct margin and no style it does not; our rule uses the table's effective margin. Open.
• Vertical centring of a page (85), the document grid (87), heading line height at a page top, diagram placement, equation display and floating wraps (edge set) are within a few points but not at the 2 pt tolerance; they are the edge-set floor.
• Superscript note numbers split extracted lines in the text comparison (106, 117, 110): their word geometry agrees to 0.1 pt, so the low text-line value there is an extraction effect.

The other requests

Round two: notes, lookups, database, encryption, inspectors, fields

Run on the same machine and build (Excel, Word and PowerPoint 16.0.20527.20112, 260 families; Aptos not installed as files and not used by any input here), one run at a time with the shared lock taken and released, no Office process left; every file was generated by us (the encryption fixtures and the inspect fixtures are the committed ones).

Inspectors (--inspect)

The object model exposes only the inspectors an add-in can implement: Word five (Collapsed Headings, Custom XML Data, Headers/Footers/Watermarks, Invisible Content, Hidden Text), Excel five (Custom XML Data, Headers and Footers, Hidden Rows and Columns, Hidden Worksheets, Invisible Content), PowerPoint four (Custom XML Data, Invisible On-Slide Content, Off-Slide Content, Presentation Notes). Comments, revisions, document properties and personal information, embedded documents, macros and links are not in the collection, so their agreement cannot be asked.

Fields and merge (update-fields, insert-file)

Word updated all fields and tables in the 13 field cases; ours are Document.UpdateFields. Per text part (body, footnotes, first header and footer): 24 compared. First comparison 13 identical; two fixes (each now has a test):

1. A table of contents over numbered headings keeps the separator the list level declares after the number (w:suff): Word writes 1. Introduction for a level that ends with a space, we wrote a tab.
2. REF \r in a paragraph that has no number is relative to the last numbered paragraph before it (Word answers i after item 1.a.i); we gave the full number.

After the fixes 17 of 24 parts are identical (case 101 and 103 now agree). The remaining differences, none a defect of the update itself:

• Footers: Page 1 of 1 in Word's saved copy against our Page 1 of N: Word's COM Fields.Update on a footer story stores the value for the story's own context, while the page count it reports is N (ComputeStatistics; 3 for case 100, as ours). Not comparable by this route.
• Case 100: the entry Gamma is on page 3 in Word and 2 in ours (layout difference; the page counts agree).
• STYLEREF in headers (cases 105, 112): Word Alpha/Smith, ours leave the cached x (the update reports them as skipped).
• Case 108: the table of authorities field is TOA \h \c 0; Word answers Error! Category number not found., ours lists every category (our reading of \c 0; open).
• Case 112: ours keeps a (continued) footnote paragraph that Word's saved file does not contain.

Merge (Word's Insert Text from File at the end of merge-a against Document.Append with the default and with the kept-both options):

• the second heading and quotation use the destination's Heading1 and Quote (28 half-points stays): same as our default;
• the second list is a new list in Word (a second abstract numbering, so it restarts at 1); our default continues the first list (NumberingContinuation.Continue), Restart gives a new list. A difference of defaults, not an error;
• the second bookmark intro is dropped by Word (the later REF intro then points at the first); we rename it intro_2 and retarget the reference;
• footnotes, comment authors (Ann, Bob) and the revision authors agree; comment ids differ (Word 1, 3; ours 0, 1);
• Word joined the first inserted paragraph to the last paragraph of merge-a (the cursor sat at the end of it), so the paragraph count differs by one; no section break in either;
• our two merge outputs open clean.

Tooling changes

tools/office-oracle now installs as OneDocumentOracle under <profile>\onedocument (the earlier task and directory were removed); the driver picks the application for an .xml Flat OPC file from its processing instruction and opens .odt, .ods, .odp, .html. layout-geometry.py and layout-floors.py are new. A file that crashes Excel leaves a recovery instance (EXCEL.EXE /restore) that later runs attach to and fail on; the batch scripts used one run per risky file and stopped that instance by its process id.

Round two added: --inspect (runs the application's DocumentInspectors and records name, status and result text), a <file>.password sidecar (passed to the open call of all three applications), a <name>.cells.tsv sidecar for formula grids (the cells the formulas read), and the Word actions update-fields (every field of every story, then every table and index) and insert-file:NAME (Insert Text from File). The tool of the rewritten notes bisection is not kept: it rewrote the compound file around a swapped group of records, using a workbook LibreOffice wrote from the same cells as the reference.