Is the Excel clipboard format documented?

Question

If I copy data from Excel, how can I get full fidelity access to it.

From what I can see, there is a format called "BIFF8".

Is this documented? How is it different from the xls file format?

Answer 1

The BIFF format is document, by Microsoft no less: MICROSOFT OFFICE EXCEL 97-2007 BINARY FILE FORMAT SPECIFICATION.

BIFF is the file format used by older versions of Excel. .xlsx being an XML based format.