Hi,

I have an Excel 4.0 file, generated by a 3rd party software. MS Office
can open it, OpenOffice.org can open it, but if I use some external
tools (ASP+ MS Jet 4 driver, or MS Excel (*.xls) driver)), it doesn't
work. I have triied many demo versions of ASP tools that are supposed to
convert any Excel file to CSV, PDF or so. But all of them said the file
format is not Excel.
Now, I have looked at the BIFF4 file format, and I have managed to write
a script that can parse the excel file.
It is working well, but on one part I am a bit cheating.
I explain. The file contains BIFF4 streamed data. There is a frst part
which contain many headers and descriptions (for fonts, size, ....).
Then comes the cell data, one after the other:
[BOF][big header][cell-1x1][cell-1x2]....[cell-4x2]...[EOF]
Each cell is formatted with header+data that I know how to identify and
translate.
The part I am cheating is that I read&skip the header based on a fixed
size: 722. This is because I have several files in this format and I
have found that the 1st row 1st col cell header starts at the 723rd byte.
I can't find the part of the header that really indicates the beginning
of the cell data. As long as I use the same 3rd party software to
generate the Excel file, it'll be ok, but I would like to be more strict
on the way to find the beginning of the 1st cell.

Thank you for any help on this file format.
(Note: I have found some info on the www.wotsit.org Files Format website)

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JSC