----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Tregenza" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, April 22, 2002 3:16 PM Subject: Hopefully useful code donation
> Hello all, > > I've have written an Excel file reader in Java as part of developing a > product for the company I work for. This was started a couple of years ago > before the HSSF project existed otherwise I would of saved myself an awful > lot of work. After some discussion I have persuaded the company (who > wishes to remain nameless due to the market we operate in) to release this > code to the HSSF. > > What the code does is read Excel 97 files and makes the data available via > a variety of classes. As this has been done to fulfil our needs it only > handles data types that are important to our product. Critically (I > believe) to the HSSF is that we fully support formulas* and named ranges. > > I don't imagine that my code (which is pretty rough** in places) can be > dropped into the HSSF but I hope that it useful as either a) something > that be quickly cannibalised and used in HSSF until something better gets > written or b) as a reference implementation to help with some of the > undocumented nasties floating around in the Excel. > > Clearly it isn't suitable for submitting to the POI CVS so I propose to > put the code up on a web site so that others on this list can use it as > required. > > Our companies plan is not to developed our code any further and when HSSF > has all the functionality we need, we will replace our code with HSSF. > Because of deadlines etc I'm not going to be able work on the HSSF code > for a while but hopefully I will have useful advice to offer in the > meantime. > > Chris Tregenza > > > *By this I mean it reads the Excel ptgs and produces a human readable > string identical to that displayed in Excel. It doesn't do any sort of > calculations. > > ** This is an understatement. When I started writing this code I had only > a few months experience of Java and no idea about the Excel file format. >
