Excel

brianmm

Saving as Excel is just CSV... any way to save as a native Excel file?

allan

Hi brianmm,

The Excel export is a little bit of a cheat since it's really outputting a CSV file (with UTF-16LE BO), which Excel will open no problem (and open by default on most systems). It's perfectly possible to use the .xls extension rather than the csv default, however some versions of Excel will give a warning saying that the file is not in xls format (which it isn't - so fair enough). There was some concern that end users didn't like this (which I agree with), so I chose to use the .csv extension, which should have as small as possible impact on the end user (particularly non-technical ones).

It is perfectly possible to write xls files, I just need to get the time to read, understand and reproduce the format :-)

Regards,
Allan

compcentral

.xlsx may be even easier to implement since it is XML based... not sure, but may be worth looking into.

allan

Hi compcentral,

Yup - I'll almost certainly do something XML based for the export. I did have a go at creating BOM3 file (Excel v3) with Flash doing binary output and it started getting a bit hairy... So yeah, an XML based file is the way forward :-)

Allan