Re: Spreadsheet translation

[Philip Nienhuis]

Windhorn, Allen E [ACIM/LSA/MKT] wrote:
> Philip et al,
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Philip Nienhuis <address@hidden>
>
> > > Yes, I believe I am using the OCT interface, it was supposed to be best for
> > > Windows.
>
> > ? who says so?
>
> The Wiki: "OCT offers read support for OOXML files (.xlsx) only, but it is by 
> far
> the fastest read option; faster than Excel itself."  and  "This is the new
> impressive and fast ... interface which presently supports .xlsx, .ods and
> .gnumeric files."

OK, so that needs an update.
I think I remember where that came from, but those times are long gone :-)

> I see now that it doesn't list the OCT interface as being able to read the
> formulas -- it did read about 90% of them though, and probably would have
> done better on a cleaner spreadsheet.

Well, OCT can (I wrote the code for it) but .xlsx is a very very 
complicated spreadsheet format (basically it's a compressed nested 
directory tree full of XML files), and we read it using regular 
expressions while XML had better be read using XML parsers and such.
In fact, all the Java based spreadsheet I/O classes are based on XML 
parsers/validators etc. But regexps are much faster than XML (although I 
often think OTOH they're much more fragile).
(If it may comfort some, .ods is just a tiny little bit less complicated.)

If you read up on the bug report in my earlier post you'll see that the 
existence of shared formulas was a bit of a surprise for us.
I'm sure OCT can be made to read (and write ...) the shared formulas as 
well, but someone will have to adapt and extend the code for it, and as 
I wrote earlier you're just the 2nd one in several years hitting this so 
there was little demand, and there are several alternatives in the form 
of other spreadsheet I/O interfaces.

> > > Octave complains that Java is installed but unusable
> >
> > Yeah that's a known one. Do you have 64-bit Octave installed (I guess
> > so)? Octave & Java bit widths should match.
>
> Yes, 64-bit Octave, and 32-bit Java, so presumably incompatible, though
> the Wiki implies it doesn't matter: "Generally, if you use a Java-based
> interface for spreadsheet I/O, it doesn't matter much whether you use
> Octave 32-bit or Octave 64-bit."

That's plain wrong and also in need of an update.
I'll try to update the wiki one of these days.

Thanks for your investigations (I don't quite visit the wiki on a daily 
basis) :-)

Philip