From: Julius de Bruijn <pimeys@...>
Date: 2006-02-20T03:03:29+09:00
Subject: Excel file modification without win32ole

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... :)