Re: Excel in Perl

[halley]

If you're not interested in pretty formatting, just consider a CSV format instead. It's plain text, it can be generated and parsed very simply in Perl. See Text::CSV among other modules. Also, you can see it and edit it in Notepad or Emacs or whatever. Excel reads and writes CSV files just fine.

[roboticus]

One problem with using .CSV files and Excel is long digit strings (such as account numbers). I've not found a way in a .CSV file to get them to appear correctly in a spreadsheet. I'm always forced to add a prefix to turn it into a string, and the sheet shows the annoying prefix.

So unless I'm missing something, there are a few cases (in addition to pretty formatting) where creating a spreadsheet is preferable to a .CSV file.

Example:

1234567890123456,"1234567890123456","'1234567890123456",'1234567890123
+456
1234567890123456,"1234567890123456","'1234567890123456",'1234567890123
+456
1234567890123456,"1234567890123456","'1234567890123456",'1234567890123
+456
1234567890123456,"1234567890123456","'1234567890123456",'1234567890123
+456
1234567890123456,"1234567890123456","'1234567890123456",'1234567890123
+456
1234567890123456,"1234567890123456","'1234567890123456",'1234567890123
+456
1234567890123456,"1234567890123456","'1234567890123456",'1234567890123
+456
1234567890123456,"1234567890123456","'1234567890123456",'1234567890123
+456

Someone ... anyone ... please prove me wrong!

...roboticus