Joey K Tuttle wrote: > OK, MS (not bashing women :) Excel - the problem is, > one often doesn't have the choice "not to use it" in > the sense that people send files exported from Excel...
And sometimes those files are broken or virus infected, etc. When the files are well formed, typically a person could use openoffice calc to read them and re-export them in a more convenient format. Alternatively, you could ask the original user for a copy of that the file in some other format. I've gotten quite a bit of mileage from asking people to save the file as CSV. In the typical case, CSV is more than adequate. CSV tends to be much easier to process programmatically (assuming you aren't using some simple thing in excel for your program -- a reasonable assumption for the case where the user is exporting the file and you are working with it in J). Failing that, asking the user to save the spreadsheet as xml retains all excel features might be easier to deal with than the default binary format. However, this is not as simple as CSV. -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
