Re: Canadian Conservative party websites and an unreadable XLS file.

[Nick Lamb <njl98r ecs soton ac uk>]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2004 at 05:42:31PM -0400, Russell McOrmond wrote:
>   I can't open this file in either Gnumeric or OpenOffice.org.  I don't 
> know what was used to generate the file, but this was one of the first 
> times I had a problem opening an XLS file in Gnumeric.  I asked the person 
> who sent it to me if they could tell me what generated it and whether I 
> could get a save-as CSV, but received no reply.

The XLS is corrupt, or is using a new feature of the latest Office so arcane
that Excel 2002 itself gets confused. I've used Excel recovery to send a
"fixed" version to Russell, but this opens questions for consideration by
Gnumeric developers.

* Do we need a recovery mode like Excel's? Is this just more fault tolerance
  for the import filters, or is it potentially an entirely separate
  component, invoked when the ordinary filter throws its hands in the air?

* Are we confident enough to dismiss files that won't load in this way
  as corrupt? If we can be sure that they're damaged we can tell the user
  and they can be appropriately distraught / angry at the sender. OTOH
  if Gnumeric gets a reputation for refusing to load files that are OK
  in Excel that's no good.

Nick.