[Ruby] working with excel spreadsheets (.xls) in ruby/rails

[shaners becker]

i think i spoke too soon. parseexcel looked pretty sweet to me at  
first. i tried using it and got:

OLE::UnknownFormatError

ole...? does that mean that this has to be running on a windows  
machine? or is WIN32OLE something different all together?

i don't really understand this area of ruby stuff.

thanks




On Jan 5, 2007, at 1:51 PM, John Howe, Seattle.rb wrote:

> I have a test tracking application that imports existing Excel test  
> plans
> into the database. Basically, I wrote an Excel parser in perl,  
> using the
> CPAN modules: Spreadsheet::ParseExcel, HTML::TextToHTML, DBI, and
> DBD::Mysql.
>
> I think the closest thing in Ruby land is the attempted port of
> Spreadsheet::ParseExcel @ http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/parseexcel/
>
>> i'm building an app that will updates its list of available products
>> every month from a file on the distributors website. unfortunately,
>> they don't provide anything remotely resembling an api. the best i
>> can do is import the contents of an Excel spreadsheet.
>>
>> i've looked around a bit and all i'm seeing is:
>> - generating xls files from ruby
>> - manually export a .csv from excel then importing from that
>> - using windows specific ruby libraries
>>
>> before i dig into this and start building it myself, i wanted to know
>> if anyone else knows of anything out there that doesn't anything like
>> this. basically, just reads the contents of an .xls file and enters
>> them into a table with an identical mapping.
>>
>> any ideas?
>> thanks
>> shane
>>
>> ------------------------------------
>> first things first. next things next.
>> http://theresistancearmy.com/blog/
>> ------------------------------------
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> -
> John Howe, B.S, M.A., Sr. Systems Administrator
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> -
>
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>  -- George Bernard Shaw
>
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------------------------------------
first things first. next things next.
http://theresistancearmy.com/blog/
------------------------------------