# Excel file modification without win32ole

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/excel-file-modification-without-win32ole/70529>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [February 19, 2006, 7:06pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/excel-file-modification-without-win32ole/70529 "2006-02-19T19:06:27Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Julius\_de\_Bruijn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/71c47a/32.png) [@Julius\_de\_Bruijn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Julius_de_Bruijn)\
**Post date:** [February 19, 2006, 7:06pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/excel-file-modification-without-win32ole/70529/1 "2006-02-19T19:06:27Z")

</div>

Greetings,

I’ve been coding some internal tools for my company with Ruby for  
several  
months and I’d like to distribute some of those tools to other employees  
too.  
I have one specific tool, which does some calculations and iterations,  
displays the values in a table and saves everything to a specified Excel  
template. The toolkit I’ve been using is Tk in W2k, Linux and OSX.

The problem is the win32ole class. Handling Excel files through the  
class is  
very slow, and if I pack my program to an exe file with rubyscript2exe,  
saving  
…xls files through win32ole halts the whole program. I’ve been  
searching some  
better classes for reading and writing Excel files with no success. The  
template I’m using is quite complex with many formulae and vba scripts.

I’m sorry I can’t publish any code here, but if somebody could give me  
some  
good hints for better ways to modify and save .xls even without MS  
Office, the  
next working week would be much nicer… 🙂

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Julius\_de\_Bruijn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/71c47a/32.png) [@Julius\_de\_Bruijn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Julius_de_Bruijn)\
**Post date:** [February 20, 2006, 4:54am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/excel-file-modification-without-win32ole/70529/2 "2006-02-20T04:54:00Z")

</div>

Julius de Bruijn wrote:

> .xls files through win32ole halts the whole program. I’ve been searching some  
> better classes for reading and writing Excel files with no success. The  
> template I’m using is quite complex with many formulae and vba scripts.
> 
> I’m sorry I can’t publish any code here, but if somebody could give me some  
> good hints for better ways to modify and save .xls even without MS Office, the  
> next working week would be much nicer… 🙂

See [http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/spreadsheet/](http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/spreadsheet/) if you don’t mind  
that it uses the Excel 95 format.

Regards,

Dan

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Julius\_de\_Bruijn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/71c47a/32.png) [@Julius\_de\_Bruijn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Julius_de_Bruijn)\
**Post date:** [February 20, 2006, 5:45am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/excel-file-modification-without-win32ole/70529/3 "2006-02-20T05:45:23Z")

</div>

> See [http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/spreadsheet/](http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/spreadsheet/) if you don’t mind  
> that it uses the Excel 95 format.

That’s the module I’ve been trying to use in my program instead of  
win32ole class. The problem is that the spreadsheet class doesn’t  
support opening an Excel template, it only creates a new file. My  
current Excel template is quite complex with seven worksheets, hundreds  
of formulae and several hundred lines of VBA, so creating it from  
scratch with Ruby’s spreadsheet module is out of question.

The problem with win32ole was it’s halt when using a compiled  
rubyscript2exe version of the program. With small tweaking, I made it  
to work. I was using “require ‘win32ole’” in a method rather than  
loading it in the beginning of the file, which was not very smart move.  
The slowness of ole commands and the requirement of Excel still bugs  
me, but maybe I can live with it for now.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Julius\_de\_Bruijn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/71c47a/32.png) [@Julius\_de\_Bruijn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Julius_de_Bruijn)\
**Post date:** [February 22, 2006, 7:53am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/excel-file-modification-without-win32ole/70529/4 "2006-02-22T07:53:55Z")

</div>

See Spreadsheet::ParseExcel [http://download.ywesee.com/parseexcel](http://download.ywesee.com/parseexcel)

[http://download.ywesee.com/parseexcel](http://download.ywesee.com/parseexcel)

# Spreadsheet::ParseExcel - Get information from an Excel file.

Version: 0.4.0  
Date: 2006-02-16

Short Description:  
Spreadsheet::ParseExcel allows you to get information out of a  
simple Excel file  
This Package is an - as of today incomplete - translation of  
Kawai Takanoris Perl-Module.

## Requirements

- ruby 1.8

## Install

De-Compress archive and enter its top directory.  
Then type:

$ ruby setup.rb config  
$ ruby setup.rb setup  
($ su)

# ruby setup.rb install

You can also install files into your favorite directory  
by supplying setup.rb some options. Try “ruby setup.rb --help”.

## Usage

workbook = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel.parse(path\_to\_file)  
worksheet = workbook.worksheet(0)  
worksheet.each(1) { |row|  
puts row.at(0)  
}