B4J Question Any way of opening an Excel 5.0 file, and immediately saving it?

B4JExplorer

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Hi,

I've been using JExcel in an application, for a year, but we always have to pre-process an Excel file, before we can use it with JExcel.


The problem is, that the vendor sends us an Excel 5.0 file. If we try to open it,

https://www.b4x.com/b4j/help/jexcel.html#readableworkbook_initialize

, it returns an error

External sheet record for Biff 7 not supported.


So, we have to first open the Excel 5.0 file, in Excel 2010, then immediately save it in xls compatibility format. From there, we're able to open the xls file successfully, and proceed to navigate through the fields.

But we're trying to avoid this manual step. We can go ahead and search for another Java library to convert the 5.0 file. But we wanted to know, if there's some way to do this, in the context of B4J's existing libraries.
 

B4JExplorer

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Longtime User
You can open it with fx.ShowExternalDocument. You can then use send keys to close Excel: https://www.b4x.com/android/forum/posts/236113/

Yeah, that won't work. We could just as easily write a vb script, to do that. Problem is, we are trying to make this an automated nighly process, on our Linux server.

Anyway, I think the only solutions are to either write a routine from scratch, that opens up Biff5 documents; or insist that the vendor update their spreadsheet generation procedures.

Thanks for the response and trying to assist, Erel
 
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