Re: libgsf question

[David J Craigon <david arabidopsis info>]

If you want to create all singing, all dancing Excel spreadsheets, and 
you are prepared to install gnumeric, I found that writing the .gnumeric 
file format (it is XML) very easy, and you can then run that through 
ssconvert to produce a genuine Excel spreadsheet. This gives you access 
to most of the spreadsheet features.

In my experience, Spreadsheet::WriteExcel sometimes produces Excel 
spreadsheets that don't open in Excel quite right. I think this was 
something to do with the fact that I was producing big spreadsheets.

David

Jon K Hellan wrote:
> 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
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnumeric-list mailing list
> > gnumeric-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumeric-list
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> gnumeric-list mailing list
> gnumeric-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumeric-list

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