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by Daniel Berger.
Original Post: The next spreadsheet release
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I have finally gotten around to working on the next release of the spreadsheet package, a port of John McNamara's excellent Spreadsheet::WriteExcel Perl module, version 2.x. This version will use the Excel 97 format instead of the older Excel 95 format that is currently used. I've got the RubyForge project setup along with a mailing list, so sign up if you're interested.
There will be a couple of changes this time around. First, OLEWriter will be a subclass of IO rather than File. This is how I probably should have done things to begin with. This change comes courtesy of Chris Williams, who wanted to be able to write to a stream for webwork, instead of linking to a file. Good idea. Second, I've given up on hash arguments in the Format class. I'm just going to use the "yield self" trick. Much cleaner and easier to read. No real loss of functionality.
In other (good) news, Charlie Mills has agreed to handle the Formula class. I think he's going to use racc rather than a recursive descent parser, which is fine by me. John McNamara has comments indicating he might switch to a yacc based parser someday, so using racc sounds like it's a good way to go.
That still leaves a port of OLE::Storage_Lite for large file support. I've tried, twice, to port this module to Ruby. Unfortunately, the code is so crappy and confusing I gave up both times. Frankly, it's a miracle the damned thing even works.
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