Scan cells in Excel active worksheet

gauss76 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi,

I have been learning Perl over the last few weeks with specific interest in being able to read Excel files on a non-windows server. I use the two packages:

use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel; use Spreadsheet::ParseXLSX;

for reading Excel .xls and .xlsx files respectively.

Recently I came across a problem that I cannot find any answer to: Is it possible to read just the cells of the active worksheet of an opened Excel file?

I know it is possible to loop over all the worksheets in the workbook and also possible to select any given worksheet by its name or number. However, in my application I only want to scan the rows and columns of the active worksheet but cannot find anyway of doing so.

Any help on this would be much appreciated.

Many thanks

gauss76

Comment on Scan cells in Excel active worksheet Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Scan cells in Excel active worksheet by SuicideJunkie (Vicar) on Apr 03, 2017 at 14:57 UTC
Well, you can't parse the excel file if it hasn't yet been saved to disk... If you want to work with an opened file, then you would need to use excel APIs (See Win32::Ole) to control the application itself. Perhaps try running it through WINE?	[reply]
Re^2: Scan cells in Excel active worksheet by gauss76 (Scribe) on Apr 03, 2017 at 15:19 UTC
OK, I explained badly! The Excel file is saved to disk on the linux server. I use the following commands to get acces to the Excel file `$parser = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel->new();` `$parser = Spreadsheet::ParseXLSX->new();` I use one of the above depending on whether the file is .xls or .xlsx. Then I use: `my $workbook = $parser->parse($FileName);` It's the next part that is causing the problem. currently I loop through all worksheets with `for my $worksheet ( $workbook->worksheets() )` But I really only want to work with the active worksheet. gauss76	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Scan cells in Excel active worksheet by huck (Prior) on Apr 03, 2017 at 15:29 UTC
http://search.cpan.org/~dougw/Spreadsheet-ParseExcel-0.65/lib/Spreadsheet/ParseExcel/Workbook.pm get_active_sheet() Return the number of the active (open) worksheet (at the time the workbook was saved. May return undef. http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/DOUGW/Spreadsheet-ParseExcel-0.65/lib/Spreadsheet/ParseExcel/Workbook.pm `sub get_active_sheet { my $workbook = shift; return $workbook->{ActiveSheet}; }` [download] Maybe you can work from that for parseXLSX	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: Scan cells in Excel active worksheet by gauss76 (Scribe) on Apr 04, 2017 at 13:07 UTC
Re^5: Scan cells in Excel active worksheet by SuicideJunkie (Vicar) on Apr 06, 2017 at 13:47 UTC
Some notes below your chosen depth have not been shown here
Re: Scan cells in Excel active workbook by gauss76 (Scribe) on Apr 03, 2017 at 14:24 UTC
I should have probably mentioned that I am using version 5.10.1 of Perl gauss76	[reply]