Excel to Code

excel_to_c - roughly translate some Excel files into C.

excel_to_ruby - roughly translate some Excel files into Ruby.

This allows spreadsheets to be:

1. Embedded in other programs, such as web servers, or optimisers
2. Without depending on any Microsoft code

For example, running these commands turns this spreadsheet into this Ruby code or this C code.

Install

Requires Ruby. Install by:

gem install excel_to_code

Run

To just have a go:

excel_to_c <excel_file_name>

This will produce a file called excelspreadsheet.c

For a more complex spreadsheet:

excel_to_c --compile --run-tests --settable <name of input worksheet> --prune-except <name of output worksheet> <excel file name> 

See the full list of options:

excel_to_c --help

Gotchas, limitations and bugs

0. No custom functions, no macros for generating results
1. Results are cached. So you must call reset(), then set values, then read values.
2. It must be possible to replace INDIRECT and OFFSET formula with standard references at compile time (e.g., INDIRECT("A"&"1") is fine, INDIRECT(userInput&"3") is not.
3. Doesn't implement all functions. See which functions are implemented.
4. Doesn't implement references that involve range unions and lists (but does implement standard ranges)
5. Sometimes gives cells as being empty, when excel would give the cell as having a numeric value of zero
6. The generated C version does not multithread and will give bad results if you try.
7. The generated code uses floating point, rather than fully precise arithmetic, so results can differ slightly.
8. The generated code uses the sprintf approach to rounding (even-odd) rather than excel's 0.5 rounds away from zero.
9. Ranges like this: Sheet1!A10:Sheet1!B20 and 3D ranges don't work.

Report bugs: https://github.com/tamc/excel_to_code/issues

Changelog

See Changes.

License

See License

Hacking

Source code: https://github.com/tamc/excel_to_code

Documentation:

• Installing from source
• Structure of this project
• How does the calculation work
• How to fix parsing errors
• How to implement a new Excel function

Some notes on how Excel works under the hood:

• The Excel file structure
• Relationships
• Workbooks
• Worksheets
• Cells
• Tables
• Shared Strings
• Array formulae