(OT) Excel reading problem

merrymonk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

As part of a Perl application I read in spreadsheets. One spreadsheet is exchanged on a regular basis with a customer.

Suddenly I now get a Microsoft Excel message ‘warning’ which says

“Do you want to save the changes to the spreadsheet that I simply reading in? Microsoft Excel recalculates formulas when opening files last saved by an earlier version of Excel.”

There are 3 buttons for Save, Don’t_Save and Cancel.

The spreadsheets have an .xls extension. I just have started using Excel 2010. My customer is using an earlier version.

I have tried saving a file from the customer as an Excel .xlsx format and then resaving as an .xls but this did not work.

I have looked in the Options for Excel as I suspect one of them will sort the problem. However I could not find one that seemed to relate to this problem.

Thank you in anticipation for any thought you have on this.

Comment on (OT) Excel reading problem

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Re: (OT) Excel reading problem by GotToBTru (Prior) on Sep 16, 2014 at 14:28 UTC
So far, I see an Excel question, not a Perl question. 1 Peter 4:10	[reply]
Re^2: (OT) Excel reading problem by merrymonk (Hermit) on Sep 16, 2014 at 14:32 UTC
Tricky one that as it is the use of Excel with Perl!	[reply]
Re^3: (OT) Excel reading problem by GotToBTru (Prior) on Sep 16, 2014 at 14:46 UTC
One might think so, except there is no Perl code anywhere in sight. Hard to make suggestions about something we can't see. 1 Peter 4:10	[reply]
Re: (OT) Excel reading problem by Anonymous Monk on Sep 16, 2014 at 22:58 UTC
`[excel button], [excel format], [ddg://site:perlmonks.org excel button], [ddg://site:perlmonks.org exc +el format]` [download] excel button, excel format, site:perlmonks.org excel button, site:perlmonks.org excel format, site:perlmonks.org excel save-as prompt alert button, site:perlmonks.org excel save-as format prompt alert ... `$Excel->{DisplayAlerts}=0;` saveas ... and see the relevant documentation on msdn )	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: (OT) Excel reading problem by merrymonk (Hermit) on Sep 17, 2014 at 15:12 UTC
The display alerts worked so that setting it to 0 before opening the file and then to 1 after all had been done, I no longer got the error message. The actual line that caused the message seems to be `$workbook->Close;` [download] which makes sense to me. Thank you.	[reply] [d/l]