sounds awesome tony, really..... rocket shouldn't launch without it
:-)
On 2/7/2012 7:14 PM, Tony Gravagno wrote:
Wil, while the OP asked about reading Excel on an iPhone, the
title of the thread is "Building an Excel File". That prompted
suggestions for how to create "Excel", including "use CSV".
Yes, all spreadsheet clients including Excel will open a CSV
file.
But that led to my assertion that "CSV is not Excel" and that
"CSV is not acceptable when people want Excel", though that is a
common belief amongst MV developers because most end-users will
just take what you give them ... and then they'll quietly start
looking for people who will give them what they really want,
Excel. This is a digression that you are welcome not to follow.
About your statements - I'm intimately familiar with internals of
Excel (Office in general), XML, CSV, and related document
standards, and I have no idea what kind of middleware you're
talking about below. CSV has no information about formatting,
it's pure data. It's therefore impossible for any utility to do
anything but autosize the columns, and that's trivial. As I said
above, if all you're doing is opening the file, sure, that should
work, but the result is hardly "Excel" outside of being text in
columns and rows.
You can't just simply 'change the "Excel" files into csv files'.
Your statement doesn't survive the first attempt. Excel will
warn you that it's going to lose detail if you do that. Again,
CSV is not Excel. It doesn't provide borders, colors, images,
cell references, merged cells, fonts, type styles, multiple
sheets, named sheets, named ranges, file properties, page
formatting, print pagination, fixed col/row settings, custom
col/row sizes, or data typing. And while you can provide
formulas in CSV, you'll lose them if you save Excel as CSV.
[AD]
And _that_ is the reason I created NebulaXLite, to allow
programmers to do all of that from BASIC, on any OS, any DBMS,
and with no underlying libraries. It's real workbooks for Excel,
Open Office, and Google docs - when everyone else is ready to
provide a delimited text file.
T
From: Wjhonson
I think somewhere this jumped the track. No one is
saying that CSV is Excel Rather the OP wanted a way to
read an "Excel" file on the Iphone. Can the Iphone
natively read Excel files?
I know that it can natively read csv files, because
we're doing it. It puts the csv file into a neat table
with a border, with columns and rows all autosized and
pretty with no effort whatsoever.
So the solution could be simply to change the "Excel"
files into csv files and voila you have no problem
anymore for the Iphone.
This doesn't address the issue of whether existing
Excel files, or Excel files you receive from others
can be handled.
It only addresses the issue of reading "Tables" (of
some kind) on the Iphone.
_______________________________________________
U2-Users mailing list
U2-Users@listserver.u2ug.org
http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
_______________________________________________
U2-Users mailing list
U2-Users@listserver.u2ug.org
http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
