ANN: xlrd 0.6.1 final is now available

[John Machin]

The final release of version 0.6.1 of xlrd is now available from
http://www.lexicon.net/sjmachin/xlrd.htm and from the Cheeseshop
(http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/xlrd).

What is xlrd? It's a small (download approx 0.1 Mb) pure-Python
library for extracting information  from Microsoft Excel (tm) files,
anywhere Python 2.1 or later will run -- no need for Excel itself, nor
COM, nor even Windows. Further info: follow the links on the home
page.

This major release incorporates the functionality of 0.6.0 which was
not released independently for various reasons including the need to
push ahead with the 0.6.1 functionality.

New in 0.6.0: facility to access named cell ranges and named
constants (Excel UI: Insert/Name/Define).

New in 0.6.1: extracts formatting information for cells (font, "number
format", background, border, alignment and protection) and rows/
columns (height/width etc). To save memory and time for those who
don't need it, this information is extracted only if formatting_info=1
is supplied to the open_workbook() function. The cell records BLANK
and MULBLANKS which contain no data, only formatting information, will
continue to be ignored in the default (no formatting info) case.

There have been several changes made to handle anomalous files
(written by 3rd party software) which Excel will open without complaint, 
but failed with xlrd, usually because an assertion fails or xlrd 
deliberately raises an exception. Refer to HISTORY.html for details. 
These have been changed to accept the anomaly either silently or with a 
NOTE message  or a WARNING message, as appropriate.

Many thanks are due to Simplistix Ltd
(http://www.simplistix.co.uk) for funding the new functionality in
0.6.1.

Since 0.6.1a4 was released in February, only one bug-fix and some
tidying up have been done --  see HISTORY.html for details.

Feedback: general discussion on the python-excel newsgroup (sign
up at http://groups.google.com/group/python-excel?lnk=li&hl=en) or
e-mail to sjmachin at lexicon dot net, preferably with [xlrd] as part of 
the message subject.

Cheers,
John