Thanks Scott. I look forward to reading it (as with all of your articles).
Where will it be published?
I know that CSV is not equivalent to Excel. I didn't mean to imply that it
was.
Your article will be very timely!
Shannon O'Donnell
-----Original Message-----
From: pctech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:pctech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Scott Klement
Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2008 3:44 PM
To: PC Technical Discussion for iSeries Users
Subject: Re: [PCTECH] 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
midrange.com
