Hehe. I was waiting for someone to post a rant like that :) Thanks, Nathan Web Controlled Robot Arm and Beetle http://www.kennedytechnology.com
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dave Lane Sent: Thursday, 30 October 2008 4:04 p.m. To: [email protected] Subject: [phpug] Re: What do we use for reading excel files in PHP5? Something to keep in mind: MS Office file formats, despite their widespread use are *closed proprietary* formats, and you have to pay a substantial license fee to provide compatibility with them. Other packages, e.g. OpenOffice, that offer compatibility with MS Office formats do so only as the result of massive reverse engineering efforts. The fact that you've been able to get info out of those file formats in the past was probably due to some hacker sitting down with a binary MS Office file and poking and prodding it until the managed to get some semblance of compatibility. Of course, it was short lived: <rant>To maintain their file format-based lock-in, Microsoft change their file format (often quite subtly) every release at least in part to force developers of those would-be competing applications to start again from square one. Perhaps those who think that Microsoft is a "nice" or even a fair company can start to see why they've been convicted of being a criminal monopoly in the US and EU jurisdictions (among others)... Microsoft have strongly back the US's adoption of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) which among other draconian measures makes the sort of reverse-engineering that the OpenOffice developers try to do illegal in the US. That has pushed much of that development out of the US. (Of course, as a condition for gaining a "free trade agreement" with the US, NZ will have to implement ACTA and other similarly draconian pro-corporate-monopoly legislation to help protect US interests in NZ). If you want to be able to integrate your applications with word processor documents, spreadsheets, etc., then I suggest looking at Open Document Format or ODF (used as the native formats for OpenOffice, Abiword, Gnumeric, KOffice, Lotus SmartSuite, and available in Google Docs, etc.), which is a set of properly open, ISO recognised file formats (like the HTML 4.0, XHTML 1.1, or other file formats). MS will reportedly be supporting ODF formats in the next release of MS Office - not because they want to (and I'm sure their lawyers are trying to find a way out of it), but because a) governments worldwide are demanding an *open* file format, b) the European Union is forcing them as part of their anti-competitive penalties, c) and because their own attempt at producing an ISO standard format, OOXML, turned out to be a total debacle (bringing the whole ISO standardisation process into disrepute), was trying to supplant the pre-existing ODF standard, and was un-implementable besides. Might not help you with your current problem, but it does explain why you're having it. </rant> Cheers, Dave --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
