excel files

["Andrew" <andrew@carroll-tech.net>]

> ------------------------------
> Message: 6
> Date: Tue, 05 Oct 2004 21:00:28 +0200
> From: Alexandre Devaure <adevaure@free.fr>
> Subject: Re: excel files
> tmoran@acm.org wrote:
> >>Depending on what you have in your Excel file, but you can use it as
a DB and
> >>use ODBC to access data.
> >
> >   Can you access formulas and formatting via ODBC, or just values in
cells?
>
> What I want is just to read values in cells.
> ------------------------------

Then ODBC should work great!  I think formulas are returned as the
contents of the cell.  I speculate that formatting is stored in some
hidden property object of the sheet or even worksheet.  If you knew
which property object then most likely you could create a recordset of
the contents of the property object and navigate to alter a cell's
formatting.  I do know that named regions in a sheet can be accessed via
ODBC as a table where the name corresponds to the table name that is
specified in the SQL statement.

I wonder if there is a way to create a binding to the libraries in
Visual Basic.  In Visual Basic, and please excuse my "vocabulary" here,
you specify which libraries are associated with the project.  There is a
list and you put little check marks next to the ones you want.  Then you
can use the object browser to view what features that library adds.
Ahhhh, I can't remember all the menu's and menu labels and stuff, darn
it.  I think I have early onset "old timers" disease.

Anyway...
Those libraries are dll files (correct me if I am wrong).  Isn't there a
way to import those into an Ada specification?  If you could do that
then you could use the object browser in VB as your guide and write in
Ada!  This way, you could "import" the Excel libraries and use them with
the same "robustness" as VB does instead of ODBC.

I think someone mentioned something similar to importing dll files with
A#.  Now if I could just remember who that was...

Andrew Carroll
Carroll-Tech
720-273-6814
andrew@carroll-tech.net