Re: How to build a program that can read the content of a very simple MS Excel file?

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Wed, Jun 13, 2007 at 08:24:49AM +0700, Huge Mountain wrote:
> Hello everyone.
> I'm trying to build a program to read the content of a Microsoft Excel file,
> just read a very simple Excel file (a file with text in cell A1, A2,...,
> don't care about formula, chart,...). I simply want to read the content of
> cell A1.  With that, I can get the binary format of MS Excel file more
> clearly.
> Ex:if cell A1 have the content: "text message", my program can show "text
> message" as result.
> Could someone tell me how to do that, or where to find the references? I
> downloaded source, file "gnumeric-1.6.3.tar.gz" from
> http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/, but I don't know how to use, which
> to compile. I'm stray  with >1000 files (some file I don't know how to
> open).
> Please help me!
> Thank in advance!

The simplest starting point would be to use gnumeric's 'ssconvert'
program from the command line to convert a .xls file into a
.gnumeric, which is really just gzipped xml.
 
> PS:  I explored a simple MS Excel file (with "abc" in cell A1, this file was
> saved by MS Excel 2000). This file have 3 stream: SummaryInfomation stream,
> DocumentSummaryInfomation stream and Workbook stream. The only stream I care
> is Workbook stream, started from byte 512 to byte (512+4096) (this stream
> has the 4096 bytes length). So, where are bytes which contain the "abc"
> string of cell A1 in this 4096 bytes?

You can use some of the test programs in libgsf (eg test-msole1) to
dump the raw data out of the Workbook stream, but that is unlikely
to be useful to you.  Gnumeric's excel plugin
(plugins/excel/ms-excel-read.c) can parse the content of Workbook
(or BOOK in earlier versions) and transform them into something
useful.  Have a look at the code for ssindex as an example of an
application that reads a spreadsheet file (any of the formats
gnumeric handles) and dumps the string contents.  That is easily
modifiable into something you could use.

Good Luck
    Jody