Read cell on excel 4.0

[Jorge_Amaral]

Hi Guys,

I've a friend of mine that's programming on C++ and he needs to create a function that could retrieve the  value of an excel cell given the path, Col and row.
I that PC there's no excel installed.
Does anyboady knows some way of doing that. i've searched for some Dll's or ActiveX (free to download) to install but with no success.

Best regards,

[shoneill]

Welcome to the wonderful world of Microsoft.

Reading from an excel file without having excel installed is not something microsoft wants you to do.  I believe reverse-engineering their files is also prohibited in their licensing terms.  But if you don't have Excel installed, then you haven't agreed to the license.... 😄

Is it not possible to save the files in a different format?  Like text.....

If you have Excel installed, it's no problem.  If you don't have Excel installed, it'll be difficult even though I believe there ARE tools somewhere for doing this.

I know OpenOffice does a good job reading the files, and the source is publicly available, so that's ONE avenue I suppose.

Shane.

[Jorge_Amaral]

Hello,

I can see that you are a microsft lover....

IOIOIIO

Well respecting the type of file. My friend told me that it's generated by another program. And he can't nothing about it.

Then Oppenoffice, it's an open source code. I've never searched on it in spite of being my word/excel etc tool. But I think that might be a little bit hard to find what i need.

But thanks for you answer

[shoneill]

Jorge,

Rant warning.....

I'm certainly not a Microsoft lover (maybe an acquaintance, but certainly not a lover, even if Microsoft wants to Scr*" us), but I have microsoft at work, at home..... Even on my PDA.  What can I say, to a certain extent I'm dependent on them, and that makes the relationship go sour.....

The parts I don't like are exactly the problem you have just run into.  Undocumented file formats.  Restrictive licensing.  They don't do anything positive for anyone except microsoft.

But political rantings aside, I would help you if I could, I just plain and simple know of no tools out there to do this job.  I am convinced there are tools for this (be it a DLL or whatever).  I have no experience of this as I interface normally directly to Excel via ActiveX.

The Openoffice link wasn't really meant as a place to start searching, it's the only place I know there's code available for importing Excel files.  Admitted, searching the source code for a small part like this would be tiring, but perhaps some of the general contributors to OO could help out.  Seriously.

Either way, I wish you luck in your search.

Shane.