6. Disclaimer
This presentation is for informational purposes only, and should
not be relied upon as a substitute or replacement for Microsoft
formal file format documentation, which is available at the
following website: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/cc313118(v=office.12).aspx. Any views or opinions
presented in this material are solely those of the author and do
not necessarily represent those of Microsoft. Microsoft
disclaims all liability for mistakes or inaccuracies in this
presentation.
Editor's Notes
Give chart or table object as example – both use references, want the data to update in apps that don’t understand the object.
This element contains a single reference to the current sheet. It does not support cross sheet references. Unlike most references in Excel, Excel makes a distinction between a single cell reference and an area reference. Hence A1 and A1:A1 are not treated the same way. The main difference between them occurs in cell adjustments. Single cell refs and area refs adjust differently when up against the end of a sheet. The reference is stored in the character node of the element.
Full row/column notation is not supported (e.g. E:E or 1:1).
References in formulas must be in A1 notation. R1C1 is not supported in the file format.
The part containing the future storage location in question (which contains the <ref> tag) must be related to a sheet via normal relationship semantics. The part can be a direct child of a sheet, or a child of a child of a sheet.
All references in the future storage area will be read & loaded by the implementing application and added to the in-memory list of references to adjust.
Multiple <ref> elements can occupy the same future storage location.
<minVer> contains a version number in its character node. It supports no special attributes. It will reset the version number to a lower value on the request of the feature that owns the FSB.
