ExcelFormat Library.docx

ExcelFormat Library

By Martin Fuchs, 3 Feb 2011

Introduction

There has been the C++ project BasicExcel for quite some years now. It is very useful to

read and write Excel sheets in.xls format. However, it contains only very basic functionality.

There are missing features like text formatting using fonts, and display formats and

formulas are not yet supported. This article covers this additional functionality. The new,

derived project ExcelFormat is based on the old BasicExcel code, and just adds what

I was missing for my own needs. If you want to see where I am using the new library, you

Compatibility

You can use the code on MS Windows with the MSVC compilers of VC++ 6.0 SP3 or later.

Using GCC on MacOSX or Linux is also supported, but with some limitations. May be it

even works in other environments like Sun Solaris, but this is not yet tested. Here you can

see a table of environments with their respective status:

Using the Code

To use the new formatting functionality, first create an XLSFormatManager object, like in

the example1() function, and attach it to an existing BasicExcel object:

void example1(const char* path)

{

BasicExcel xls;

// create sheet 1 and get the associated BasicExcelWorksheet pointer

xls.New(1);

ExcelFont font_bold;

font_bold._weight = FW_BOLD; // 700=bold, 400=normal

The format of an Excel cell can be defined by a CellFormat object, which holds the

chosen font and some more properties:

CellFormat fmt_bold(fmt_mgr);

fmt_bold.set_font(font_bold);

After you have prepared the CellFormat, you can choose the font and display settings

of Excel cells by callingSetFormat():

cell->Set("TITLE");

cell->SetFormat(fmt_bold);

}

while(++row < 4) {

for(int col=0; col<10; ++col)

sheet->Cell(row, col)->Set("text");

}

CellFormat fmt_red_bold(fmt_mgr, font_red_bold);

fmt_red_bold.set_color1(COLOR1_PAT_SOLID); // solid background

fmt_red_bold.set_color2(MAKE_COLOR2(EGA_BLUE,0)); // blue background

CellFormat fmt_green(fmt_mgr, ExcelFont().set_color_index(EGA_GREEN));

for(col=0; col<10; ++col) {

BasicExcelCell* cell = sheet->Cell(row, col);