On 2004-01-20, Oleg Fedtchenko wrote:
I cannot find any documentation for Excel file format to
develop an engine for my software to output Excel files.

Who can advise on this? Thank you

There are a couple of options.

1) Find a copy of the 'Excel 97 Developers kit' it had some docs
2) Look at the online docs for openoffice
3) Look at the source code for gnumeric (gnumeric/plugins/excel)
4) Have a look at the hssf project that is part of apache
5) Use perl:excelwrite

However, none of these answer the real question. Why do you need to
generate the xls directly ? If you are willing to take a slightly
more indirect approach I'd suggest generating gnumeric formated xml,
then using ssconvert to map that to xls. The xml is much easier to
read, and you'd be able to spring board off of the gnumeric xls
exporter and its maintenance and bugfixing.

Good Luck
Jody (Gnumeric maintainer)