From: djberg96@... (Daniel Berger)
Date: 2004-08-11T23:56:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Spreadsheet/Excel default format

Hi Matt,

Matt Maycock <ummaycoc@gmail.com> wrote in message news:<e86cebfb04081013522cb54c4@mail.gmail.com>...
> I use the Daniel Berger's port of John McNamara's Excel module for
> Perl.  Everything works great, but it seems that there is no `default'
> format - so cells (in Excel 2K) are black if they haven't been
> formatted - and have `no color' in the format dialog.  I just format
> all around the area I'm using - but I was wondering if there is some
> method of describing a default format?
> 
> Matt Maycock

Chris Thomas spotted this one as well a short while back.  I seem to
have accidentally introduced this bug in 0.2.9.  I believe commenting
out these lines (235-246) in format.rb will fix it:

# Assume a solid fill color if the bg_color or fg_color are set but
# the pattern value is not set
if (@pattern < 0x01) && (@bg_color != 0x41) && (@fg_color == 0x40)
   @fg_color = @bg_color
   @bg_color = 0x40
   @pattern  = 1
end

if (@pattern < 0x01) && (@bg_color == 0x41) && (@fg_color != 0x41)
   @bg_color = 0x40
   @pattern = 1
end

I'm working on porting Spreadsheet::WriteExcel 2.x at the moment (I'm
about 3/4 done), so I doubt I'm going to go back and officially patch
this for the old version.

Also, please report bugs on the project page at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rubyspreadsheet/.  It makes it easier
for me to track.  I've also setup my own mailing list for the
spreadsheet package if you're interested - it's very low traffic. :)

Thanks for the report.

Dan