Excel is a spreadsheet written by '''The Evil Empire''' [http://www.microsoft.com/]. It is a part of their [Microsoft Office] suite of software--a hazardously flawed [http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/spreadsheet_addiction.html#excel] part, incidentally. ---- Ways to get to .xls data: [DDE]; [COM], especially [tcom]; [CSV]; [ODBC] (there are rumors of faults in the drivers, though); [Victor Wagner]'s xls2csv [http://www.ice.ru/~vitus/catdoc]; xhHtml [http://chicago.sourceforge.net/xlhtml] is a command-line utility that can create XML output; Spreadsheet::ParseExcel [] and related [Perl]-coded modules available through [CPAN]; Christoph Bauer's tclexcel [http://www.rhrk.uni-kl.de/~bauerc/tclexcel.html] or via the wayback machine: [http://web.archive.org/web/20040423070017/http://www-user.rhrk.uni-kl.de/~bauerc/tclexcel.html] ; http://www.greytrout.com; [SYLK]; the [Python]-based http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyxlwriter/ , alleged to be "a port of John McNamara's Perl Spreadsheet:WriteExcel ..."; John Machin's elegantly portable Python-based xlrd [http://www.lexicon.net/sjmachin/xlrd.htm]; ... The name of the native Excel file format apparently is BIFF. At some point, it'll be valuable to document the location of [Microsoft] references on BIFF, as well as whether the Perl and Python modules write formatted plaintext, or BIFF. Yet another rumor has it that Excel reads an old, but useful, format called SYLK. There is a freely-available Excel viewer from Microsoft (MS Windows only) [http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/2000/xlviewer.aspx]; For Linux/Unix, Gnumeric [http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/] and StarOffice [http://www.staroffice.com/] can import Excel files; ---- I have written a tcl wrapper [Using Perl to get Excel] to make the writing of excel files using perl's Spreadsheet:WriteExcel very managable - [JBR]. ---- More information is available through http://www.wotsit.org/ [[find more precise URL]]. http://www.wotsit.org/download.asp?f=xls Links directly to the fileformat are not allowed anymore on wotsit. So you have to go to "Spreadsheet/Database" and look for "XLS". ---- [["If you tab delimit the data and name it myfile.xls, current versions of excel will 'do the right thing'."]] [CL] has recently had success with "pipe-delimiting"; that is, writing tabular data as simply as possible, with '|' separating fields. Office workers seem to accept this as "spreadsheet format". Later, in fall 2004, CL's finding abundant headaches with [CSV] and tab- and pipe-delimitation, but is happy with results from [HTML] formatting into a