The first publicly-released version of the xlrd (Excel read) package is now available for download from: * http://www.lexicon.net/sjmachin/xlrd.htm * PyPI (Windows installer only; unresolved problem with uploading source-distribution zip file) Purpose: Provide a library for developers to extract data from Microsoft Excel (tm) spreadsheet files. It is not an end-user tool. Platform: Any. You don’t need to be on Windows. If you are, you can avoid hassles with approaches like COM, ODBC, save-as-CSV, etc Python requirements: Works with Python 2.2 or later. There are no dependencies on modules or packages outside the standard Python distribution. Versions of Excel supported: 2004, 2002, XP, 2000, 97, 95, 5.0, 4.0, 3.0. Features: * Strong support for handling dates, and documentation of Excel date problems and how to avoid them. * Unicode aware; correctly handles "compressed" Unicode in modern files; decodes legacy charsets in older files (if Python has the codec). * Extracts all data (including Booleans and error-values) Exclusions: xlrd will not attempt to decode password-protected (encrypted) files. Otherwise, it will safely and reliably ignore any of these if present: * Anything to do with the on-screen presentation of the data (fonts, panes, column widths, row heights, ...) * Charts, Macros, Pictures, any other embedded object. WARNING: currently this includes embedded worksheets. * Visual Basic (VBA) modules * Formulas (results of formula calculations are extracted, of course) * Comments and hyperlinks WANTED: *ALPHA* testers with: * bigendian platforms, and/or * Excel 95 (or earlier) files created in non-Latin1 locales Feedback: mailto: sjmachin@lexicon.net preferably with [xlrd] in the message subject. ------- End of forwarded message -------