# Part II. GSF: History

GSF was written as part of the Gnumeric project. It started in 2002 as a replacement for libole2 which Gnumeric was using to handle the Microsoft Excel® file format, as libole2's code had become difficult to maintain and was difficult to generalize. GSF was designed to be a more general library for dealing with a number of different types of structured data files and streams.

With the release of Gnumeric 1.1.6 (July 2002), Gnumeric used GSF and libole2 was orphaned.