My comment that csv files can be read on the Iphone without any effort and they look nice only addresses the issue of reading "tables" on the iphone. Period. That's it. That's essentially what the OP wanted, unless of course some cells are actually calculated values.
The information that we are pushing out to various persons for reading on their phones doesn't include formulas. It mostly consists of data being loaded, errors in the load, and valid loads and their effects. I don't know what the iphone is doing to allow these csvs to be seen as tables, but it was clever of them to include code to do that, because we didn't. It was an accidental discovery that it works, it surely wasn't intentional on my part. That Tony is the ONLY thing I was trying to address. Nothing else that you brought up. And again I never said csv was Excel. I said csv comes up, on the iphone, as a table. However it does it. -----Original Message----- From: Tony Gravagno <3xk547...@sneakemail.com> To: u2-users <u2-users@listserver.u2ug.org> Sent: Tue, Feb 7, 2012 7:15 pm Subject: Re: [U2] Building an Excel File 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