Re: Excel BLOB

As luck would have it, I'm currently writing an article (to be published on Thursday) that discusses pulling an image file into an Excel spreadsheet from RPG. My article uses HSSF to do the job, and outputs a file in Excel's native XLS format (BIFF in an OLE2 wrapper -- the old format)

Excel doesn't actually load an image into a cell. Instead, it loads it into the workbook, then within the sheet ("tab") there's a tool called a "client anchor" that tells it which cells to draw the image over.

AFIAK, this is not possible in CSV format. Please understand that CSV format is not (despite you referring to it as "Excel (csv)") native to Excel or really an Excel format in any way. CSV has existed forever -- longer than Microsoft has, in fact. It's not actually related to Excel. Granted, Excel can read CSV -- indeed, Excel can read just about any text format (CSV, tab-delimited, plain text, HTML, XML, etc) but there are many other packages that can read these formats as well, and they certainly aren't designed for Excel, nor can they support even a significant fraction of Excel's functionality.

XLS (and the newer Office Open XML formats) do support all of Excel's capabilities...

Anyway, if your goal is to display the image in an Excel spreadsheet, you might be interested in my article, to be published on Thursday.


Shannon ODonnell wrote:

Hi,


I'm not anything close to an Excel guru so I don't know if this is even
possible. but can you drop objects into Excel cells?

I have the need to create a comma delimited file that will describe an image
file (things like the image name, an item number it is associated with,
etc.). No problem. But one of the fields requested is the actual image
file itself, in the Excel (csv) file. I don't think I can do this in a
simple .csv file at all..but is this possible in an Excel file?



Shannon O'Donnell