Re: XLS from RPGLE

On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 3:50 PM, Roche, Bob <broche@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I am using Scott Klement's port of HSSF POI to create a few spreadsheets from RPGLE programs. These are then sent by email and look fine in Excel. I have one person trying to view them on their IPhone and the formulas do not show properly. It always displays 0. In excel I see =SUM(B1:B9) for example. Has anyone come across this before? If I save the spreadsheet off in excel with a new name and then email it they formulas work properly.

Yes, that is normal. The storage for formulas and "evaluated" values
are separate. How Excel (the genuine article from Microsoft) does it
is that it writes both upon saving the file. But third-party writers,
as a rule, do not do this. Some give you the capability to write your
own value (that you calculate yourself), as well as your own formula,
in the same cell. I don't know if POI allows this.

So on the reading end of things, of course genuine Excel will
automatically re-evaluate formulas by default; third-party readers
(like the one used on the iPhone, but really just about everything
other than genuine Excel) typically just read the stored value, and if
nothing was explicitly written there, it comes up as zero.

John Y.