excel_to_code

Excel to Code

excel_to_c - roughly translate some Excel files into C.

excel_to_ruby - roughly translate some Excel files into Ruby.

This allows spreadsheets to be:

• Embedded in other programs, such as web servers, or optimisers
• Without depending on any Microsoft code

For example, running these commands turns this spreadsheet into this Ruby code or this C code.

Install

Requires Ruby. Install by:

gem install excel_to_code

Run

To just have a go:

excel_to_c <excel_file_name>

This will produce a file called excelspreadsheet.c

For a more complex spreadsheet:

excel_to_c --compile --run-tests --settable <name of input worksheet> --prune-except <name of output worksheet> <excel file name> 

See the full list of options:

excel_to_c --help

Gotchas, limitations and bugs

• No custom functions, no macros for generating results
• Results are cached. So you must call reset(), then set values, then read values.
• It must be possible to replace INDIRECT and OFFSET formula with standard references at compile time (e.g., INDIRECT("A"&"1") is fine, INDIRECT(userInput&"3") is not.
• Doesn't implement all functions. See which functions are implemented.
• Doesn't implement references that involve range unions and lists (but does implement standard ranges)
• Sometimes gives cells as being empty, when excel would give the cell as having a numeric value of zero
• The generated C version does not multithread and will give bad results if you try.
• The generated code uses floating point, rather than fully precise arithmetic, so results can differ slightly.
• The generated code uses the sprintf approach to rounding (even-odd) rather than excel's 0.5 rounds away from zero.
• Ranges like this: Sheet1!A10:Sheet1!B20 and 3D ranges don't work.

Report bugs: https://github.com/tamc/excel_to_code/issues

Changelog

See Changes.

License

See License

Hacking

Source code: https://github.com/tamc/excel_to_code

Documentation:

• Installing from source
• Structure of this project
• How does the calculation work
• How to fix parsing errors
• How to implement a new Excel function

Some notes on how Excel works under the hood:

• The Excel file structure
• Relationships
• Workbooks
• Worksheets
• Cells
• Tables
• Shared Strings
• Array formulae