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. [LV] If the person writing would sign their work, then I would have no problem seeing it left, just as, if you wanted to write something flattering, and sign it, I would expect others who disagreed with you to leave your comments up. As this is a wiki where people are encouraged to add relevant comments, feel free to provide some alternative view on the subject. ''[EKB] I suppose what I objected to was having this as the 1-line unsigned intro at the top of the page. I personally prefer the pages that have a flat-footed and factual intro, like the one-line intro to the [Word] page, with the signed opinions appearing on the rest of the page. But I'll take this page as it is and add a signed opinionated intro! :-) On a side note, I'm sorry you now have to reach Unix via XP. It ain't right.'' [EKB]'s Intro: Excel is the spreadsheet component in [Microsoft Office]. Like other spreadsheet programs, such as [OpenOffice].org's Calc, it is somewhat limited, but very flexible. This can lead to use of spreadsheets when other, and better, tools are available [http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/spreadsheet_addiction.html]. However, the flexibility can make it easy to develop quick solutions to problems, and the spreadsheet solution may turn out to be enough to do the job - like Tcl! Excel has a long development history, and (in this author's opinion) is the most stable and usable of the MS Office suite. It has a large suite of functions, is extensible via the VBA scripting language, and the interface has several handy shortcuts (such as double-clicking to copy calculations automatically). Again in this author's opinion, although the calculation aspects of Excel are very closely mirrored in OpenOffice.org, the graph functionality in Excel is currently better than that in OO. ---- 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.45.free.net/~vitus/software/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] Yet another rumor has it that Excel reads an old, but useful, format called sylk (SYmbolic LinK) which can be parsed in Tcl [SYLK]. What you do with the data is another thing. * 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], which operates independently of any Excel installation * the pyExcelerator [http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyexcelerator] * [http://www.posoft.de/html/extTcomExcel.html%|%TcomExcel%|%] from [Paul Obermeier] 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. 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; ---- [peterc] 2008-07-17: Can anyone suggest something which handles conversions from XLS to CSV where fields are multi-line (eg, paragraphed text)? Microsoft's own export function is rubbish at this. (Even something which converts an in-field newline to a tab or space would be a step up.) ---- 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-delimiting, but is happy with results from [HTML] formatting into a