From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-10-29T03:53:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Efficient parsing of large Excel documents in Ruby

Wes Gamble wrote:
> I was definitely thinking about using win32ole/Excel to convert this 
> spreadsheet to CSV and then process it with a CSV parser.
> 
> I'm currently running on Linux though, so now I have to figure out any 
> issues around a Windows production platform.
> 
> Thanks,
> Wes
> 
> 

Have you tried unixODBC? It seems to work fairly well, although there
are some issues with most Linux/Unix tools when the spreadsheet has tabs
or column headers with spaces in them.

It's fairly easy to leave the Excel spreadsheets on a Windows system and
hack together a simple "server" for them. I think all you have to do is
"publish them to the intranet", but I've never done it. Then you can use
something like Hpricot to parse them.