On 17 October 2016 at 15:02, Henning Thielemann <lemming@henning-thielemann.de> wrote:

Btw. I recently found out that a pretty nice and simple format for interchange between Haskell, Excel and LibreOffice is the Excel 2003 XML format. It supports Unicode, hyperlinks, merged cells, font styles, formulas, reliable number formats (no hassle with decimal point vs. decimal comma) - neither CSV nor HTML supports all of these features.

Do you directly interpret the XML or there is a higher level package to do so? Why not use Office Open XML, the 2007 format?

One way to interpret the older formats like BIFF/Excel-97 could be to convert them to the newer ones and then parse it as the newer format. That way we will have to deal with only one format. Are there any such lightweight, command line based converters available?

-harendra