What's the status of formula support? There are recent messages saying it's in an early stage of development: message from Andy Oliver on March 7th suggests you still have to write the parser.
I've been developing a spreadsheet compiler/decompiler, and as part of this, I have code to read and write SLK files. These are a lot simpler than XLS (basically, one command per line, plain text and standard notation for formulae, plus a few special tags), but perhaps my code could be useful to you? The parser is written with the JavaCC parser-generator, see http://www.webgain.com/products/java_cc/ . This is relatively easy to use - standard declarative notation for syntax, plus semantic rules written in Java - and comes with a number of examples. It's also free. I parse formulae into trees, the standard way to represent expressions in compiler writing. I've also written a module that converts these trees back into strings, used when writing the formulae back out. If any of this is useful, I'm happy to donate the code. It would need some adapting, but it would get you a fair way there, especially with the parser. One of the things I've used it for is an 'Autopublisher' to which one can submit spreadsheets and have them automatically converted into Web pages plus server-side code to evaluate the spreadsheet. This reads SLK files and uses the formulae in several ways: to be analysed for cell dependencies, to be evaluated, and to be decompiled into a summary of the calculations, so shows that my representation can be used in a variety of ways. Jocelyn Paine http://www.ifs.org.uk/~popx/ Spreadsheet Autopublisher: http://www.bized.ac.uk/virtual/vla/autopublisher/ Model Master spreadsheet tools: http://www.ifs.org.uk/~popx/mm_publications.html
