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Rewrite of Excel classes.

Months ago I wrote classes to read a Microsoft Excel file. It was good enough for the client who needed it to read values. Simply ascii strings and numbers.

Later we included it in our plugin collection and a couple of wishes came. First our classes didn't do well with text encoding. They read only binary xls files and not the newer xml based files. But biggest problem was performance. Especially with large files.

How to solve those problems?

Well, one reason you use plugins is that you want to save time and avoid recreating the wheel. So do we. We decided to go with libXL, a library for reading and writing excel files. The new plugin includes features like this:
  • Read and Write Excel files.
  • no need for Microsoft Excel (this is not OLE)
  • Generate new files from scratch
  • Extract data from Excel files
  • Edit existing files
  • Supports Excel 97-2003 binary formats (xls) and Excel 2007/2010 xml formats (xlsx).
  • Fully unicode compatible.
  • Crossplatform solution for Mac, Linux and Windows.
  • Fast.
Of course this has a price. In addition to our plugin which comes with the Complete, you need a license for libxl which costs $199 per platform and developer. Or $1199 for all platforms and all developers per company. Check the website for more details.
Our old plugin will be removed from official releases.
30 08 11 - 22:23