Reading excel without office (compiled script)

[Myicq]

This question may be trivial: I am working on an application where customers can define parameters etc in Excel files (also). But the definition may be done in an office environment, whereas the definition file may be used in production, where Excel may not be available.

 

So, in a compiled script (including excel.au3), can I read excel XLSX files (read-only is OK), or do I need certain components like ADO, or.. am I out of luck ?

I can imagine others have been in similar situations, so would like to know the practicalities of the problem. If impossible, I will have to come up with something else / workaround.

 

[water]

When you need to access Excel files without Excel being installed you could use ADO:

Or check my ADO tutorial in the wiki including example scripts.

Or check mLipok's ADO UDF (but it is still a Beta version):

 

[orbs]

in the office environment, have your application read the Excel made by the users (as you probably already do now), but save it to csv or tsv (or any other plain text, like ini) for the transfer to production.

 

[water]

If you could post an example of your file we could suggest how to best solve your problem.

[Myicq]

@water Thank you for suggestion on ADO. I think I will go with that. Essentially it's me being too lazy to build a GUI to input structured information. I need to store some global parameters and along with that an array 1..n of information. Think a little along lines of a graphical layout: you have paper size, margins, resolution etc as parameters, and 1..n objects with content, rotation, font, and many other parameters.

Developing a usable gui for all that + data storage is not simple (for me ), so that's reason behind excel format. In excel, it's trivial to format a few cells, protect a few others, add healines, and pretty much done.

 

[water]

IIRC there as a UDF available to present an INI file in an editable format in a GUI.
Would this fit your needs?

[mLipok]

1 hour ago, water said:

Or check mLipok's ADO UDF (but it is still a Beta version):

 

@Myicq I encourage you to take advantage.
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