The Ruby Spreadsheet

Modifying an exiting Workbook with several Worksheets with the Ruby spreadsheet library

zdavatz — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 06:22:22 +0000

This question has been asked many times on the mailing list:

I have an Excel file (workbook) with many worksheets in it. Now I modify one worksheet but leave the other worksheets untouched. When I write the file and then try to open it with OpenOffice or Microsoft Office the file hangs. What do I have to do?

1. You need to write the modified file to a new file name.

2. If the Workbook contains empty sheets, delete the empty sheets from the source file. There is no point in carrying empty sheets around.

3. If the Workbook contains 1 sheet that you want to modify but you want to leave the other worksheets untouched because they contain data, then read the following post from John Smith (very smart guy).

http://groups.google.com/group/rubyspreadsheet/browse_thread/thread/f5bc157b06b66604

4. If you find a better solution, let me know via the list – and do not forget to post your sample code to github (please do not post it in the mail).

Ruby Spreadsheet 0.6.5.3 has been released

zdavatz — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 15:48:23 +0000

Thanks to Alexandre Bini for this update. See: http://url.ba/ery3

PS: A lot of questions have already been answered here:

http://rubyforge.org/forum/forum.php?set=custom&forum_id=2920&style=nested&max_rows=50&submit=Change+View

New Mailinglist for Ruby Spreadsheet

zdavatz — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 08:43:57 +0000

This is the new mailing list for Ruby Spreadsheet.

http://groups.google.com/group/rubyspreadsheet

Any technical, featural or legal question should go here, or as a comment into this blog. Feel free to document on your own site as well and then just send in your link to the ML. You may also write in Japanese if you like or prefer, the answer may come in english though. English is the preferred language.

Hiding and Grouping of columns and lines now possible with Ruby Spreadsheet

zdavatz — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 16:10:47 +0000

If you are using Ruby-Spreadsheet to edit existing Excel Files then we have a new feature for you: Hiding, Unhiding, and Outlining of columns and lines is now possible with Ruby-Spreadsheet 0.6.5.

You can create a new file with outline and hiding rows and columns as
follows:

require ‘spreadsheet’

# create a new book and sheet
book = Spreadsheet::Workbook.new
sheet = book.create_worksheet
5.times {|j| 5.times {|i| sheet[j,i] = (i+1)*10**j}}

# column
sheet.column(2).hidden = true
sheet.column(3).hidden = true
sheet.column(2).outline_level = 1
sheet.column(3).outline_level = 1

# row
sheet.row(2).hidden = true
sheet.row(3).hidden = true
sheet.row(2).outline_level = 1
sheet.row(3).outline_level = 1

# save file
book.write ‘out.xls’

gem and gemspec for ruby spreadsheet 0.6.5 can be found here. Hit the “Blob” link to download the gem.

# This deletes the highest outline level

require ‘spreadsheet’

file = ARGV[0]
book = Spreadsheet.open(file, ‘rb’)
sheet= book.worksheet(0)

26.upto(30) do |i|
sheet.row(i).outline_level = 4
end

book.write “out.xls”

# This hides the rows in the highest level of outline

require ‘spreadsheet’

file = ARGV[0]
book = Spreadsheet.open(file, ‘rb’)
sheet= book.worksheet(0)

26.upto(30) do |i|
sheet.row(i).hidden = true
end

book.write “out.xls”

See the sample file. Sample Nested Outline for Ruby-Spreadsheet 0.6.5.

getting ready to add some new features to ruby-spreadsheet

zdavatz — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 08:07:42 +0000

We are getting ready to add some new features to ruby spreadsheet: http://dev.ywesee.com/wiki.php/Spreadsheet/Iss

Formula support is coming to spreadsheet, we just do not know when

zdavatz — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:18:29 +0000

Obviously Formula support is the single most wanted feature for Ruby-Spreadsheet. This will come, we just do not know when. In the meantime we fixed two bugs:

Add missing Font-encoding
Properly encode fragment mark in URLs

check it out at: http://scm.ywesee.com/?p=spreadsheet/.git;a=summary

Exported Formulas displaying #name? and #REF? when opened in Excel

zdavatz — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 07:23:03 +0000

The Ruby Spreadsheet Gem is not acting as expected with the formula of cell A2 in: http://www.kangarooit.com/test/test_input.xls When copying this formula into another spreadsheet (and writing that spreadsheet to disk using the ruby Spreadsheet API), the resultant spreadsheet (test_output.xls) shows ‘#REF!’ in mac excel and ‘#NAME?’ in openoffice for cell A2 instead of ’365′ How can this script be modified so that the resultant spreadsheet ‘test_output.xls’ has ’365′ visible in cell A2 when opened in a spreadsheet program (eg. excel, open office)?? To test this behavior, copy this script into a file called ‘spreadsheet_spec.rb’ & run: > spec spreadsheet_spec.rb

http://pastie.org/809024?theme=blackboard

http://github.com/jacobat/ruby-spreadsheet/issues#issue/2

Requests for commercial Ruby-Spreadsheet Licences

zdavatz — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 07:17:23 +0000

So far we got requests from the following companies for commercial, Non-GPLv3 Ruby Spreadsheet Licences:

Workbooks.com
AtomicObject.com (not for profit request)
Digipaint.nl
Lynxgl.com
A major corporation
Every Day Hero
Mikamai
DataXu Colin Timmermans
ISS
National Library of Medicine
Swrve.com Steve Collins
freewheel.tv Alex Ng (License revoked until further notice)
shorelabs.com Zbyszek

For commercial NON-GPLv3 Licences please contact zdavatz at ywesee dot com.

Not-For-Profit Licence for Ruby-Spreadsheet

zdavatz — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:55:07 +0000

Today we received an Email from AtomicObject regarding a free NON-GPLv3 licence for their Non-For-Profit Project SMEToolkit – that code is not OpenSource other code from AtomicObject obviously is OSS. After our first reaction of a flat denial to do so, we had some internal discussions and would be willing to provide AtomicObject with a licence for SMEToolkit under the following circumstances (and maybe more to come):

1. Where will we be credited for our work? Where in the Website and where in the source code? The term to mention would be “ywesee – the Ruby Spreadsheet” that of course would have to be linked i.e. to some new Blog entry on this Blog. Maybe even with this entry.

2. Where, in which countries, and on how many servers do you and will you run http://www.smetoolkit.org/smetoolkit/en?

3. What are the reasons why http://www.smetoolkit.org/ can not be licensed under GPLv3? We would like to state those reasons in the free license.

4. We could only grant our licence for this specific project. Other projects and clients of AtomicObject would not be allowed to use Ruby Spreadsheet under the possibly given licence.

5. We are willing to do this because we want you to see how easy it is to print a spreadsheet with our Software and of course because we want to sell additional licences to you for your other NON GPLv3 clients.

Lets see how this turns out.

0.6.3.1 Ruby Spreadsheet released

zdavatz — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:02:17 +0000

*   Reduce warnings produced by running under ruby -w
*   Improved auto-formatting for Dates and Times
* Honor Row, Column, Worksheet and Workbook-formats
* Merge branch ‘master’ into HEAD
*   Only select the First Worksheet by default

http://scm.ywesee.com/?p=spreadsheet/.git;a=summary