On Wed, 25 Jun 2003 11:51:44 +0100 (BST), you wrote in message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> >The Excel .xls format is poorly documented, probably deliberately >obfuscated. A direct interface is on the TODO list: it should be quite >easy in Windows and possible in other OSes (there is code in Gnumeric, for >example). In any case, this is a lot harder than the interfaces currently >in foreign. The OpenOffice web site has reasonably complete documentation on this web page: <http://sc.openoffice.org>. It skips some of the more obscure features, but those probably wouldn't be of interest to R either. It looks to me as though it would be relatively easy to write (in R, using the streams code) a reader that could read strings and numbers. Interpreting formulas would be a lot harder. (It's possible the last value of a formula is stored in the .xls file, in which case it would be easily read too.) One thing I'm not sure about: recent .xls versions store strings in Unicode. Does R have cross-platform Unicode support? Duncan ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help