Re: gnumeric file format & formulas

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Tue, Sep 21, 2004 at 04:03:34PM +0200, Josep Monés i Teixidor wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm working on a set of GNU Octave functions to import and export data 
> from gnumeric files and I'd like to make a suggestion:
>
> When parsing the file I've noticed that the current result value is not 
> included for formula cells. This (which MS Excel XML file format does) 
> would be very convenient for importing data outside a spreadsheet, since 
> calculating formulas would really be a non-sense.

It's possible.  This was an oversight in the original design.
Unfortunately we chose to store the expression as the content for
cell with formulas which makes for ugly asymetries in the format if
we do this.  We can consider it during 1.5.x
 
> BTW, could I do that using a bonobo interface, does that exist?
there is a corba interface that (thanks to jonkare) no longer
crashes.  However, it doesn't do much either.

> Or perhaps a library?
We're working on a libgnumeric, and are making progress.  There are
java and python projects to generate files, but nothing to parse
them that I know of.

> I think that just parsing the xml file is better 
Agreed.