Excel

[Matthias Kuhn]

Hi,

has anyone a solution to read excel (.xls) files direct with

Powerbasic ?

Regards

matthias Kuhn

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[John Schexnaydre]

don't know how many of these are useful in dos, but:
http://www.powerbasic.com/support/pb...ad.php?t=20546

you could use shell out for the sheetstotab option.


john



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[Mel Bishop]

To do it yourself, open the file in BINARY mode., i.e.,
open "somefile.xls" for binary as #x

This way, the program will ignore all control characters and
you will have access to the entire file.

Decoding the file structure, however, is something you will
have to oversome yourself. There should be lots of info on the
web about how to do this.

Good luck!


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[Paul Squires]

I have code to write to an Excel file directly, but not
read from it. http://www.planetsquires.com/downloads.htm That
code could probably be adapted to PB/DOS easily.



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Paul Squires
Cheetah Database System - "Nothing runs like a Cheetah"
JellyFish Pro Editor - "Custom code editor for PowerBasic"
www.planetsquires.com
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

[RM Green]

Matthias -

Here is a very detailed discussion of the file formats used in
all versions of Excel.
http://sc.openoffice.org/excelfileformat.pdf

You will see that all recent versions (since Excel 5.0) use some
version of BIFF with OLE2 storage.

I have a data recovery application which reads OLE docfiles (used
by Word, Excel and PowerPoint) but only at the metadata level. It
reads a couple of streams but by brute force rather than trying
to parse the formats. (The application has determine such things
as whether it is looking at a complete or truncated file, what
application created the file, the original file name where
possible, etc.)

I don't know of an existing DOS program that can read data
from Excel files, but what you want to do should be possible.
Also difficult. More like a marathon than a stroll.

Bob




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