Re: libgsf question

[Jon K Hellan <hellan acm org>]

libgsf is not sufficient for writing Excel files. libgsf handles the ole
container format, but does not help you to generate the Excel (BIFF)
records.

I'm not sure what your requirements are. If there aren't formulas in
your data, and you don't care about formatting, you could get away with
simply writing comma separated (CSV) files, and naming them "foo.xls".
This will fool Excel. If there are formulas and/or formatting, you could
try the Perl module Spreadsheet::WriteExcel, or the Java POI library.

You can also convert a CSV file to a "real" Excel file using the
ssconvert program, which comes with gnumeric. If you get want full
flexibility, and the Perl and Java modules aren't sufficient, you could
even try to write your own program using the Gnumeric machinery.

Hope this helps

Jon Kåre

On Mon, 2005-06-20 at 14:27 -0600, Kem Mason wrote:
> I'm not certain this is the right forum, but I looked through the 
> mail.gnome.org archives for this mailing list and it looks close.
>
> The problem I'm having is this:
>
> I downloaded libgsf in order to write (fairly simple) Excel spreadsheet 
> files on linux.
>
> I'm having a hard time understanding the documentation at:
> http://www.gnome.org/projects/libgsf/
>
> What I'm wondering is this:
>
> Are there any really simple examples of how to write an excel 
> spreadsheet?  If I had a basic outline for creating one that had data in a 
> cell or two,  I don't think I'd have any problem moving forward from 
> there.  Obviously looking at the source for gnumeric, or something else 
> that uses libgsf is a possibility (and maybe the route I need to take) -- 
> I'm just hoping there might be some reference I'm missing that would save 
> me a bunch of time -- not really excited about diving into code that's not 
> intended to be an example, although if this route doesn't pan out, that's 
> what I'll do I think.
>
> Any suggestions / pointers welcome.
>
> Thanks,
> Kem
>
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