Creating Excel files on Linux

[brueckd at tbye.com]

On Sun, 9 Sep 2001, Roman Suzi wrote:

> Microsoft takes open standards and make some little "improvements"
> to them. I do not know, what is wrong, but I was unable
> to communicate RTF from StarOffice to Office 2002 (==XP?)
> due to loss of some letters.

Yep, this even happens with their *own* open standards!

I once had to write a program that generated RTF files to be
viewed/printed in Word. So, naturally, I downloaded the RTF spec and wrote
code to generate correct RTF. Unfortunately, anything beyond the simplest
RTF *almost always* crashed Word; Word could neither read nor create
"correct" RTF. In the end I had to go through each feature I wanted to
support and create that feature in Word, save it as RTF, and then manually
look at the RTF to see how it needed to look.

Grrrr.....

-Dave