Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti schrieb: 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. 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. 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

On Wed, 31 Oct 2007, Sven Schreiber wrote: Touché. I found someone who's got Office 2003 and I did an experiment. I created a file containing x y 1 3.2 2 3.2 3 4.1 4 4.1 and saved it in Office2003 format. Both CVS gretl and gnumeric 1.6.3 read it perfectly, so it must be a subtler issue. Possibly, there are some record types we can't handle properly. It'd be very useful if someone could post an example file which gretl can't open. IMO it all boils down to comparing how likely a use is to have data in xls2003 format, how difficult it would be to convert it to another format outside gretl and how much effort it would take to provide native support. As for openoffice, ODF support would be nice. Besides, it's a well-documented xml format. However, this is the theory; in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. The gnumeric C file which contains the algorithm for reading odf spreadsheets is a 115K gorilla. True, we don't need most of the stuff they do (charts, styles and so on), but even ripping what we need from their implementation would be quite a big task. Excellent. Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti Dipartimento di Economia Università Politecnica delle Marche r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it http://www.econ.univpm.it/lucchetti

On Wed, 31 Oct 2007, Sven Schreiber wrote: I think we basically have what we need: routines for unzipping composite files (we have this for gretl session files), and routines for parsing XML (we're already linked to libxml2). In fact, I think we can read ODS (and the Microsoft stuff too, if we want to) using a slightly modified version of the existing gnumeric_import.c. I'm not going to start on that before 1.6.6, but once that's out the door we could start on generalizing gnumeric_import to handle the other XML formats. Allin.