Hey pple,

Need some help in reading/ writing of MS Excel files using C or C++ programming. Thought of using C++ programming but apparently, I was unable to generate sensible results from it. --> Thus, I hope that I can find some answers/ help from here.

1. What is the file format that we have to save our spreadsheet as? Is it .csv file format? ??:

2. How do we read/ write Excel files using C or C++ programming?

Thanks

1. Proprietary. Changes with successive releases of new versions of Microsoft Office. If you save your spreadsheed in csv format, it's a text file that you can read with any program. Writing it back as a csv is no problem, but you can't get it back into excel in the same form as the xls file that you had originally. Over the years lots of people have come up with ways to read and write Excel files. In my opinion: if you find a way that works for now, be prepared to experiment and revise and jump through hoops whenever a new version of Microsoft Office is realease. You could look into ODBC solutions, like this http://www.thecodeproject.com/database/excel_odbc.asp Use a search engine to get more links.
2. Try searching msdn (http://www.msdn.com). You will find things like this: http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;178782

Note that if you use Mozilla or Firefox you will find that the web page has been cleverly constructed so that the sample code is more-or-less unusable. You may have to use Internet Explorer to get something that you can cut and paste to your machine.

Another thing to investigate may be OpenOffice.org (versions of this run on Windows as well as Linux). The OpenOffice.org spreadsheet program, Calc, can read and write Excel files. You may be able to find links to open software information about how it is done. I haven't tried this. (I have enough things to keep me busy; I don't need another hobby just now.)



Regards,

Dave

Saving in .CSV format is the easiest.

There is a way to hook the Excel application stub into your program. I've done it in VB. Dave's link shows how to do it in MFC. I wonder if there's a way to do it with straight API's... The mind shrinks in horror -- but it might be doable

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Hi Dave,

This links tells how to write/read into an excel sheet using VB. Is there any way to write into an excel sheet using C code?

I have problems reading and writing excel files with c++. But for now, I create a text document (.txt) and then rename it to .xls. And you can read and write to this file like it's a text file. This is one but a bad solution. When saving, you have to leave the format as it is and when exiting, you should click 'No' when asked to save. This works, but everything gets turned to text. The formulas disappear, leaving only the solution (in text format). I'm stuck with this method until I move on to Visual C++.