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About the structure of OLE files
================================

This page is part of the documentation for
`olefile <http://olefile.readthedocs.io/en/latest/>`__. It
provides a brief overview of the structure of `Microsoft OLE2 files
(also called Structured Storage, Compound File Binary Format or Compound
Document File
Format) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_File_Binary_Format>`__,
such as Microsoft Office 97-2003 documents, Image Composer and FlashPix
files, Outlook messages, StickyNotes, several Microscopy file formats,
McAfee antivirus quarantine files, etc.

An OLE file can be seen as a mini file system or a Zip archive: It
contains **streams** of data that look like files embedded within the
OLE file. Each stream has a name. For example, the main stream of a MS
Word document containing its text is named "WordDocument".

An OLE file can also contain **storages**. A storage is a folder that
contains streams or other storages. For example, a MS Word document with
VBA macros has a storage called "Macros".

Special streams can contain **properties**. A property is a specific
value that can be used to store information such as the metadata of a
document (title, author, creation date, etc). Property stream names
usually start with the character '\\x05' (ASCII code 5).

For example, a typical MS Word document may look like this:

.. figure:: OLE_VBA_sample.png
   :alt: 

Go to the :doc:`Howto` page to see how to use all olefile features to parse
OLE files.