FreeXL  1.0.6
Other tools and libraries

There an impressively wide choice of Free and open source libraries and tools supporting the .xls format.

A sample:

A quick critical review:

  • GUI tools implementations are difficult to re-use. They focus on import of all formulas, GUI presentation and so on, which is really a different use.
  • Java libraries seem to be really interesting, but Java is difficult to call from a C or C++ program.
  • Several C/C++ libraries exist, but none of them seems to be sufficient and stable as required. Some are still marked to be “beta-stage” despite being released some four or five years ago - project activity seems to be very low, and download statistics are discouraging.

Conclusion: a suitable C/C++ library supporting data extraction from .xls files doesn't seem to exists: or at least, there is no obvious reference choice.

So we'll go on the hardest way, we'll develop yet another .xls reading library: FreeXL.