Re: Excel by XML generation

On Dec 16, 2020, at 10:34 AM, Darren Strong <darren@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Well...just stumbled on the following. Looks like there may be a C library that might be interesting. I hope someone didn't already point this out to me...sorry if you did.

http://blog.rpgnextgen.com/blog/2018/03/21/libxlsxwriter-creating-spreadsheets-natively

It is very interesting, and I can vouch for its quality, because it is
from the same author as the Python library I use, XlsxWriter.

He is an extremely meticulous developer, and his expertise with Excel
is extensive. He wrote basically the same library initially in Perl,
then ported it to Python (maybe partly as a learning exercise???). I
think he may have written it in Ruby as well. The C version you are
looking at is, not surprisingly, the hardest one to enhance and
maintain. It is less feature-rich than the Perl and Python versions,
but still should have more than enough functionality for most use
cases.

On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 10:39 AM Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I looked at that one about 6 months ago but decided against using it as there was no sign of movement in the project for 12 months and not much in the year before that.

Maybe time to revisit.

Mihael's blog post (which is an excellent resource) links to the
Bitbucket repo, but the author has migrated completely to GitHub:

https://github.com/jmcnamara/libxlsxwriter

Jon, regardless of whether you found the project on GitHub, this is
one case where I would still feel quite comfortable recommending a
project "with no sign of movement". Sometimes a library just reaches a
point of maturity. Granted, this particular library can (and still
will, I understand) be updated further. But on the strength of this
author's work, I would not hesitate to use it even if it is not
maintained as frequently as its Perl and Python cousins.

John Y.