https://abhishekmurthy.com/tags/xml/Recent content in xml on Abhishek MurthyHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usFri, 24 Apr 2026 16:05:24 -0400https://abhishekmurthy.com/posts/xlsx-files-are-little-filesystems/Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:05:24 -0400https://abhishekmurthy.com/posts/xlsx-files-are-little-filesystems/The first surprising thing about an .xlsx file is that it is not really a file. It is a ZIP archive wearing a spreadsheet costume. Rename budget.xlsx to budget.zip, unzip it, and the workbook falls open into a small filesystem: budget.xlsx [Content_Types].xml _rels/.rels xl/ workbook.xml _rels/workbook.xml.rels worksheets/sheet1.xml worksheets/_rels/sheet1.xml.rels sharedStrings.xml styles.xml comments1.xml drawings/vmlDrawing1.vml That is the moment Excel stops being “a grid” and starts looking like a tiny operating system. There is a package manifest, relationship graph, string table, style table, worksheet storage, drawing layer, comments subsystem, formulas, dimensions, merged ranges, hyperlinks, and sometimes a pile of legacy VML that refuses to die.