Re: POI - is 3.6 the latest supported version?

On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 4:38 PM, Scott Klement
<midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The old Excel format (sometimes called 'binary' format...the technical name
is BIFF8 in an OLE2 compound document) with the extension .XLS is a really
ugly mess of a format.

To pick some nits, there were previous BIFF versions as well, and
files that end in .xls could be any of them. Where I work, we still
have an ancient version of some RJS package that scrapes spooled files
into BIFF5.

But all versions of Excel in the last 12 years or so support the newer .XLSX
format, which is just zipped XML files, so generating these yourself isn't
so hard.

The newer .xlsx format (whose technical name is, careful now, Office
Open XML) was actually introduced with Excel 2007. So it's definitely
not 12 years old (as of 2015).

You are probably conflating the newer .xlsx with the "XML Spreadsheet"
format introduced with Excel 2002. That format was meant to have the
extension .xml, but several third-party products write out that format
and slap on .xls. Unlike .xlsx, the XML Spreadsheet format wasn't
zipped, and was much simpler. It actually resembles an HTML table, but
with different tag names.

I don't think anyone would argue that .xlsx is nearly as bad as any of
the binary formats, but it's still not trivial. The XML in a .xlsx is
split up into various pieces, and it still has some of the structural
trappings from the binary days (shared string table, for example).

I'll just say it's way, way, WAY easier to write .xlsx than true
binary .xls, but it's not as easy as one might expect, especially if
one has XML Spreadsheet in mind (which really *is* easy, both to read
and write).

John Y.