Re: [Gretl-devel] Excel 2003 xls format
Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti schrieb:
I've had a report from a user who wasn't able to open via gretl an xls
file created by Excel 2003. Since I don't have access to the software,
I'm not able mayself to do any type of check.
Could someone please try this and report the results?
Actually some weeks ago I think we indeed had problems like this. We
ended up doing everything with csv-files, which I mostly do anyway.
If MS changed the xls format so gretl's unable to read the newer files,
there are a few things we may do: in the short run, we should advise
Excel users to save their files using an older format. When we have time
(presumably, after 1.6.6), we should IMO provide support for it.
While I guess I agree, this goes against your previously stated
preference for gretl to focus on econometrics and let other programs do
the data management. I'll remind you of it next time I have to argue
with you ;-)
Apart from that, I think Office 2003 should be the last supported
format, I would be against MS "openxml" support for political reasons
(not even counting that it probably would be a lot of work). Which
brings me to the issue of ODF support, which gretl should have ASAP IMHO.
From a
quick web search, it looks like the xls 2003 format isn't officially
documented anywhere, but apparently it has been reverse-engineered by
the Openoffice.org people. I _think_ gnumeric should handle it too: if
it does, that's great, because the way gnumeric is written is much more
similar to gretl than openoffice, and it should be much easier to rip
code from them.
Unfortunately, http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/features.shtml
only talks about formats up to Office XP which predates Office 2003.
For Python there seem to exist some libraries (pyExcelerator, xlrd and
xlwt), so *possibly* I might be able to write a py4gretl function to
read excel 2003 files. But of course native support would be much nicer.
Now that we have a feature request tracker, I will add two issues there
about xls 2003 and ods support!
cheers,
sven