It's a euphemism that I have my doubt about the sincerity of any American business when it comes to respecting users privacy when you know what's going on with the full-take NSA collection and warrantless requests.

But I am intrigued by the fact that every software vendor out there, not just in the US, ironically, is bound by parties to use encryption modules that are FIPS-compliant. FIPS-compliant is a set of standard algorithms and key lengths.

All FIPS-level algorithms have a thing in common, the key lengths are fairly low by today standards, especially when NSA super computers can compute trillion keys every second.

I am therefore suspicious that FIPS-level algorithms are in fact all cracked by the NSA already, and that by having parties asking vendors to comply to FIPS, what they are actually asking is that NSA be able to read anything that gets encrypted by you without much effort.

As a consequence, I think the proper action should be the opposite. Any business that requires a vendor to be FIPS compliant should be told that they are an active piece of pariot act and as such have lost any credible reason to conduct business with. Such party should not be supported in their request.

Whenever the vendor is not from the US, it should be all the more natural to take this stand.

Or vendors should admit that they are just toys of a big conspiracy against everyone.

You decide.

In previous builds were introduced 40 Office themes and a new default theme, but there has also been work around the scenarios in which they apply :

- generation of new XLS files : unaffected since there is no such thing as a theme in the XLS file format

- generation of new XLSX files : theme settings stored, rendered and applied

- reading of XLS files : xlsgen chart renderer enforces the classic theme (i.e. Excel 2003 theme) unless told otherwise

- reading of XLSX files : xlsgen chart renderer enforces the stored theme unless told otherwise

- reading of XLSB files : xlsgen extracts the theme, renders and stores it unless told otherwise

- custom theme : round-tripping support, rendering support

Build 3.5.0.91 of xlsgen changes the default theme. It affects both new XLSX files (and their variants) as well as the rendering of charts by xlsgen.

The default theme is now Elemental, which is one of the 40 Office themes available in xlsgen.

To be more accurate, it uses Elemental for fonts and effects, but it uses the Adjacency theme colors. Indeed a theme is made of 3 independent sections : colors, fonts and effects, and a client application may choose a different theme for each section, among the 40 themes. The Elemental colors were shades of blue, and we believe it would be more appropriate to use a more diverse set of colors. That is why we choose Adjacency colors.

It is equivalent to writing the following in code, except you don't have to :

workbook.ThemeManager.Theme = workbooktheme_elemental;
workbook.ThemeManager.CustomColors = workbooktheme_adjacency;

It can be noted that this is just being the default and at any point in time in your client application, the theme can be modified by either choosing an entire theme (just one line of code), or a different theme for just colors, fonts or effects. For this there is this ThemeManager property available at the workbook level.

Most notably, if you would like to keep using the theme prior this change, all you have to do is add this line of code in your program :

workbook.ThemeManager.Theme = workbooktheme_modern;

The chart style itself for any new chart defaults on moderate effect with auto colors, which provides great looking shadow and soft edge effects. You can also go back to what it was before :

chart.Theme.EffectSpan = chartthemeeffectspan_none;
chart.Theme.ColorSpan = chartthemecolorspan_auto;


Below is a few charts rendered with the new default theme :