[Gretl-devel] Excel 2003 xls format

[Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti]

I've had a report from a user who wasn't able to open via gretl an xls 
file created by Excel 2003. Since I don't have access to the software, I'm 
not able mayself to do any type of check.

Could someone please try this and report the results?

If MS changed the xls format so gretl's unable to read the newer files, 
there are a few things we may do: in the short run, we should advise Excel 
users to save their files using an older format. When we have time 
(presumably, after 1.6.6), we should IMO provide support for it. From a 
quick web search, it looks like the xls 2003 format isn't officially 
documented anywhere, but apparently it has been reverse-engineered by the 
Openoffice.org people. I _think_ gnumeric should handle it too: if it 
does, that's great, because the way gnumeric is written is much more 
similar to gretl than openoffice, and it should be much easier to rip 
code from them.



Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Economia
Università Politecnica delle Marche

r.lucchetti at univpm.it
http://www.econ.univpm.it/lucchetti