Document Tool

A DOCX file is a ZIP archive full of XML. Once you know that, a lot of document behaviour stops being mysterious.

These posts pull apart the formats you deal with every day. What is actually inside a Word file and why the formatting sometimes survives a conversion and sometimes does not. Why a spreadsheet exported to CSV loses your formulas and keeps only the results. How Markdown became the format people write in and HTML the format people read, and what gets lost crossing between them.

There is also a practical strand: organising a folder of two hundred mixed files, spotting duplicates that are not byte-identical, and getting a batch of documents into one place without a cloud sync service reading them first.

For teachers, admin staff and researchers who handle sensitive documents and would rather not upload a personnel file to a free online converter to find out what happens to it.

The Document Organizer does the work; these posts explain why it makes the choices it does — including the conversions it refuses to attempt.