To read A EXCEL-Sheet from Cobol Program ?

[Achim]

Is there any standard tool or special cobol program to read excel sheets from cobol programs. <br><br>I would be very pleased, if anybody has an answer for me.<br><br>Achim

 

[MuadDubby]

Achim -<br><br>If I were you, I'd go onto Microsoft's site and try and find info on the structure of the Excel Worksheet files. I don't know if they offer this for free or not, but if they do, you could use it to open the file and interpret its contents. <br><br>If open and interpreting it turns out to be too ineffective or hard with COBOL, I'd write a C/C++ DLL that would do it for me, and dump the contents of the file into an ascii text file that my cobol program can then read.

 

[Crox]

Hi,<br><br>the easiest way to do something with spreadsheets is using the SYLK format which has extention SLK. You can make a sheet in Excel and save it in .SLK format. There are descriptions of this format. It is up-and-downwards compatible so a .SLK file can be read by for example the good-old-multiplan although it wil of course not understand all of the modern features, but it will understand the calculations. <br><br>I made an interpreter some time ago to process excel spreadsheets, using the .SLK format. It worked ok.