Re: Spreadsheet support in core Octave instead of io package?

[Michael Goffioul]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 4:55 AM, Pascal Dupuis <address@hidden> wrote:

2014-10-13 22:45 GMT+02:00 John W. Eaton <address@hidden>:
> xlsread, xlswrite, and xlsfinfo are all core functions in Matlab.  I'd like
> to make them core functions in Octave as well, as I suspect many users would
> like to have these functions available by default without having to install
> a separate package.  Is there any objection to moving them from the io
> package to core Octave?
>
> I'd also consider moving the odsread, odswrite, and odsfinfo functions to
> core Octave at the same time, though I also wonder whether it might make
> sense to just put the XLS and ODS capabilities in a single function instead
> of splitting them up in separate functions.
>
> Comments?

Hello John,

for now, the xls* func works in conjunction with a number of Java
packages, namely the Apache POI set. This introduces two dependencies,
one on the POI jar files which must be referenced in the JAVA class
path; the other is on Java itself. I spent some time recently to try
to get Java running under Octave in a cygwin environment without
success.

If you want to integrate the xls* funcs into octave-core, this requires
1) to distribute and integrate the Apache POI libs;
2) to conditionnaly include this feature: a working Java
implementation must be available.

There's also another interface that uses COM from the Windows package, and uses Excel directly to read/write XLS files. Philip is probably the best one to list the various interfaces that can be used by the xls* functions.

Michael.