Dear Monks,

For a cgi application on a unix box, I want to open an existing Excel spreadsheet that's sitting on the server, write new data to one of the worksheets, and download the updated file to the user.

We have successfully created and downloaded new Excel workbooks using Spreadsheet::WriteExcel (a most excellent module). But, perusing the Spreadsheet::WriteExcel documentation, we can find no open() or similar command. Worse, we've found articles on other developpers' sites stating flatly that you can't do this with Spreadsheet::WriteExcel - the best you can do is parse an existing file to get cell values, but formatting and formulas are lost. As the whole purpose of the other worksheets in this file is to calculate tables and generate graphical charts based on the first sheet's values, losing formulas is not an option.

So, this is my last shot - does anyone out there have knowledge of how to do this, knowledge that would have escaped the documentation and other developers?

Thanks.

20031224 Edit by BazB: Changed title from 'Spreadsheet::WriteExcel'


In reply to Preserving metadata when processing Excel file by punchcard_don

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