cole is a free C OLE library. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) to help more software be released as free software.
cole can handle Microsoft OLE's Structured Storage and Compound Files, which are used in files generated by many Microsoft programs. Examples of programs that uses Compound Files are: Microsoft Word 6/95/97, Excel 5/95/97, Microsoft Publisher and Microsoft PowerPoint. OLEdecode function extracts streams from such kind of files, while OLEcode function takes some streams and generates a Compound Files.
cole doesn't know about internal structure of a stream, it only reads the raw data. You can use then the Microsoft's documentation available at http://msdn.microsoft.com or the information available at http://www.wotsit.org to read that structure.
cole is for developers that want to handle such files in an enviroment where Microsoft's functions are not available or its usage is not desirable. cole is written in ANSI C for the greatest portability, but it can use some plataform specific functions if available for the greatest performance.