[Info-vax] WEENDOZE question

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/7/2018 11:46 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>   <VAXman-  @SendSpamHere.ORG> wrote:
>>> Was your job to write out an Excel Spreadsheet or a
>>> Numbers|LibreOffice|Gnumeric|Shheets Spreadsheet?
>>> You originally said "an Excel Spreadsheet".  The
>>> customer is a Windows customer so we can assume they
>>> wanted an Excel Spreadsheet.  If the spreadsheet
>>> you created doesn't work with Excel how is it that
>>> Excel got it wrong?
>>
>> http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/c071691_ISO_IEC_29500-1_2016.zip#en
>>
>> Download it and read it.  Then, unzip an Excel .XLSX and look at its contents.
> 
> The problem is that the .XLSX format is very very touchy.  It looks like
> an XML file inside, but really it isn't.

Are you saying that the XML does is not well formed XML or that it does
not validate against the schemas??

>                                           You can write code to generate it
> to the standard but that doesn't mean Excel will read it.  And if Excel does,
> it might not in the next release.

I would think using a well tested library to generate should make it
likely to work.

LO (and OOo) seems to read and write it OK.

> It's safer to generate an old-style .XLS file.  It's even safer to generate
> a .CSV file.
> 
> If your goal is to generate a file that Excel can read, you have a lot of
> different options.  .CSV is almost always acceptable and is very easy to
> write.  Sometimes it's not, and .XLS is needed.  I have never seen anyone
> who really needed to create an .XLSX file but I have seen some who thought
> they did.

I think the support for header border is pretty bad in CSV.

:-)

I would consider it more likely that a library generating XLS
have bugs than a library generating XLSX. XLSX was defined to be
implementable while XLS was opened late in its history.

Arne