[Info-vax] WEENDOZE question

[Scott Dorsey]

=?UTF-8?Q?Arne_Vajh=c3=b8j?=  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>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??

I am saying that it matters what order the XML fields are in, for instance.
_Reading_ an XLSX file is easy because it is good XML.  The thing is, just
because you write a good XML file doesn't mean Excel will read it.

>>                                           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.

They do, for the current version of Excel, but when the next version comes
out it will turn out to be touchy in other different ways.  

>> 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.

This is true, and this is when it's not and you need to write an .XLS file.

>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.

That sounds reasonable, but I have not found it to be the case.
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."