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Is there any package to manipulate excel files?

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Guillermo Polito

Is there any package to manipulate excel files?

I was searching in squeaksource, and querying the posts in the list, but I couldn't find anything useful :S.

Thank you!
Guille

Marcus Denker-4

Re: Is there any package to manipulate excel files?

On Nov 1, 2010, at 3:38 PM, Guillermo Polito wrote:

> I was searching in squeaksource, and querying the posts in the list, but I couldn't find anything useful :S.

if is is a comma-separated file (.csv) you can easily parse the lines with String>>#findTokens:escapedBy:

Of course this does not help with real excel files.... which are quite complex (as one would imagine)
http://sc.openoffice.org/excelfileformat.pdf

Marcus

--
Marcus Denker -- http://www.marcusdenker.de
INRIA Lille -- Nord Europe. Team RMoD.

Guillermo Polito

Re: Is there any package to manipulate excel files?

It is a bad an awful real excel file :(.

On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 11:57 AM, Marcus Denker <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Nov 1, 2010, at 3:38 PM, Guillermo Polito wrote:

> I was searching in squeaksource, and querying the posts in the list, but I couldn't find anything useful :S.

if is is a comma-separated file (.csv) you can easily parse the lines with String>>#findTokens:escapedBy:

Of course this does not help with real excel files.... which are quite complex (as one would imagine)
http://sc.openoffice.org/excelfileformat.pdf

Marcus

--
Marcus Denker -- http://www.marcusdenker.de
INRIA Lille -- Nord Europe. Team RMoD.

Mariano Martinez Peck

Re: Is there any package to manipulate excel files?

There were people trying to use ODBC to talk to an excel file, but to "query". I don't think it would work for "manipulate"

cheers

mariano

On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 12:08 PM, Guillermo Polito <[hidden email]> wrote:

It is a bad an awful real excel file :(.

On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 11:57 AM, Marcus Denker <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Nov 1, 2010, at 3:38 PM, Guillermo Polito wrote:

> I was searching in squeaksource, and querying the posts in the list, but I couldn't find anything useful :S.

if is is a comma-separated file (.csv) you can easily parse the lines with String>>#findTokens:escapedBy:

Of course this does not help with real excel files.... which are quite complex (as one would imagine)
http://sc.openoffice.org/excelfileformat.pdf

Marcus

--
Marcus Denker -- http://www.marcusdenker.de
INRIA Lille -- Nord Europe. Team RMoD.

Yanni Chiu

Re: Is there any package to manipulate excel files?

In reply to this post by Guillermo Polito

On 01/11/10 11:08 AM, Guillermo Polito wrote:
> It is a bad an awful real excel file :(.

Excel also has an XML format. You may be able to manipulate it in this
format. It takes some back & forth, but you can eventually figure out
how changes to the XML affect the spreadsheet, and vice versa. I was
able to create separate worksheets, and control column widths, in the
XML I generated.

Can you get the Excel file saved in XML format, if you need to read it?
Excel is able to recognize some magic text at the start of the XML, so
it has no problem reading such a file.

Is this a one time conversion, or will it be repeated in a workflow?

--
Yanni Chiu

Hannes Hirzel

Re: Is there any package to manipulate excel files?

In reply to this post by Guillermo Polito

On 11/1/10, Guillermo Polito <[hidden email]> wrote:
> It is a bad an awful real excel file :(.

2003 (pre-XML, binary) or 2007 (OpenXML, zip file)?

A note: If your client still works with 2003 they might install a 2007
compatibility plugin so that 2007 XML files may be used.

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
File Formats
FileFormatConverters.exe (37.0MB)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displaylang=en

Dealing with an XML file is possible. Depending on what you want to do
it might be straightforward.

--Hannes

>
> On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 11:57 AM, Marcus Denker
> <[hidden email]>wrote:
>
>>
>> On Nov 1, 2010, at 3:38 PM, Guillermo Polito wrote:
>>
>> > I was searching in squeaksource, and querying the posts in the list, but
>> I couldn't find anything useful :S.
>>
>> if is is a comma-separated file (.csv) you can easily parse the lines with
>> String>>#findTokens:escapedBy:
>>
>> Of course this does not help with real excel files.... which are quite
>> complex (as one would imagine)
>> http://sc.openoffice.org/excelfileformat.pdf
>>
>> Marcus
>>
>> --
>> Marcus Denker -- http://www.marcusdenker.de
>> INRIA Lille -- Nord Europe. Team RMoD.
>>
>>
>>
>

eMko

Re: Is there any package to manipulate excel files?

If you only want to export data from your application (e.g. statistics), you can make a plain-text file with html table (just only table, no head, body or html node) and save with extension xls. This ugly-file will be normally opened by excel (but if user make some changes and saves in excel, it will be converted into normal excel format).

This is the most ugly but easiest way to make "export data to excel" feature.