Why proprietary report formats are this hard to replace

[PLACEHOLDER — Philip to write the real essay.]

The short version: a legacy report file isn't a report definition the way a SQL view or a modern dashboard config is. It's an executable, with embedded formulas, conditional formatting, subreport dependencies, and a runtime that resolves data sources at print time. Vendors who built migration tools in the 2010s discovered this the hard way — they could parse the file, but they couldn't run it.

[PLACEHOLDER — three to five more paragraphs covering: the formula engine, the runtime resolver, why lossy conversion to other reporting tools breaks more than it preserves, and what a clean-slate approach has to look like.]