I’ve rather made a name for myself as and anti-closed standards person on some boards I’m on and have perhaps pissed a few people off by implementing policies on file uploads etc. However, I recently got stung because I had saved important information (both my undergraduate theses) in a closed format a few years back. When I went to get at that information again a few weeks ago I realised I was in for a battle because the format I had saved the data in was no longer supported and since it is a closed standard no one else could make a viewer or a converter for it.

No prizes for guessing which company swallowed both my theses, it was of course MicroSoft. When I was in 4th year I had discovered an obscure but really cool tool that came with MS Office 97 called "Binder". This allowed you to build up a document out of lots of sub-documents of any MS Office type. In other words you could have a separate Word Document for each chapter making it much easier to edit and also include Excel spreadsheets etc. All these sub-documents could then be printed as one document and Binder would make sure all the pages were numbered correctly for you. Binder saved all your sub-documents in one file in its own format (.obd file).

When I went to convert my thesses to PDF for publication on my website I was horrified to find that neither Office 2000 nor Office XP had a clue how to open an Office Binder file. Some googling on the matter revealed that MS had abandoned Binder from Office 2000 on and had not bothered to even bundel a converter/extractor or anything like that. If you had used Binder your documents were gone. MS obviously don’t give a damd about their customers if they dare use any of the more obscure tools they charge you an arm and a leg for. I was majorly not impressed.

In the end I had to find a machine that still had Office 97 and then install a PDF printer driver to get my theses back out. It took me weeks and a lot of hassle and even now my CS thesis is missing two appendices because I had done those in MS Project and that too disappeared into the ether and I haven’t been able to find a machine with that installed anywhere yet.

Bottom line, if you value your data save it in an open format so that people other than the company that wrote the software you use can write readers/converters so you can always get at your data. Proprietary data formats are dangerous so don’t trust your data to the whims of people like MicroSoft!