Re: XLS from RPGLE

Oh, so I forgot to mention what to do about it.

My recommendation is: if the file is just for viewing and the formulas
are not very important, then do the calculation yourself, write the
value, and don't bother writing any Excel formulas. I think in most
cases, the value is much more important than the formula. Hey, if you
were scraping a spooled file into Excel, or copying a physical file
into Excel, all you'd get is the value anyway.

If the formula is important, or at least helpful (because people will
actually be opening the file in Excel and playing around with it), and
you *can* write both the formula and the value, then of course do
that. (Just be aware that if you open such a file in the genuine
article Excel, and then without ANY input on your part, you decide to
close out of it, Excel will ask you if you want to save your changes.
What changes? You didn't touch anything! Well, Excel can recognize
that the values stored in the file are "dirty" and so when it
recalculates everything anyway, those recalculations count as changes
to the sheet. I think in principle it should be possible for a
third-party writer to spoof the file so that Excel thinks the stored
values are its own, but I have not heard of any packages that do this
by default, nor have I seen any that expose and document an easy way
to do this yourself. I think I sort of managed to do it once with
Python and XlsxWriter, though I can't say I really know what I'm doing
in this regard, and I may well have broken something else in the
process, I don't remember.)

John Y.