https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=50939

Mats Wolpers <[email protected]> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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             Status|NEEDINFO                    |NEW

--- Comment #4 from Mats Wolpers <[email protected]> 2011-03-17 14:23:08 
EDT ---
How was that file produced?

1. Cannot be too sure: as i explained in section 2.5, the file's history is
long and difficult to track given the fluctuation we've seen in file handling
staff. Obviously, nobody left a check-in tag saying : incidentally, i ate them
6 reserve bytes.

2.1 of the former editors, those that are still available for questioning
remember nothing noteworthy. As far as can be told now, this file has never
been subjected to anything other than treatment by Excel 2003.
2.2 the template the file was made from is still available, and it is sound in
the sense that if i re-create the file with today's content straight from the
template, the resulting file can be opened through POI without throwing RFEs.
In other words, something happened along the road, but it is impossible to say
what with any certainty.

3. One potential source of strangeness is the fact that for a while this file
was in the hands of another group who confessed to using the "Extras >
Arbeitsmappe freigeben" feature ( apologies: my excel speaks German, if i
translate this roughly into "Extras > Share workbook", would that be
recognizable? ). These people not only did part of their work in a different
LAN (imagine: different building on another campus), they carried computers
from the one LAN to the other with the file open but the machine in sleep mode,
or similar. To my untrained eye ( i haven't studied this feature, my toe nails
curl up at the very thought...) , this is a potential source of trouble.
A trivial "2 users hit the same file on some shared drive" test failed to
reproduce my original  symptom.
(please understand i'm stealing this research from company time, and their
patience will only stretch that far.)

We found one other file that exhibits the same behaviour (want 6, receive 0,
throw), and that second file had also been with that other group, which is all
the corroboration i can offer. Inconclusive, of course.

4. This probably is a silly question, but bear with me, please: is there
anything that my code could do to manipulate the file without actually opening
it? If i could get at its content  at all, life might become easy: delete the
sheets i don't need (losing the offending data) and proceed. piece of cake.

5. I still wonder why/how all those office programs handle this file so
gracefully: they wouldn't just add the missing 6 bytes of prescribed zero
content and proceed, would they? i mean, if even i can think of that, there
must be something wrong with the idea. right?

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