Excel has become something of a lingua franca for financial information – you can be relatively sure you can share your figures with others if they’re in Excel. Ah, but how do you get them into Excel if they’re stored elsewhere? You can employ Excel Writer, an application that produces simple Excel files with basic formatting from a variety of sources.
Excel Writer can use financial data pumped from a database, historical data on the Web, a human-readable log file, statistics from a profiler, source metrics – in short, a just about anywhere. It’s more flexible in getting information than Excel itself. With Excel you’d need to use the Excel API, meaning your application would need to be on a computer where Excel is also installed.
Swiss developer Gautier de Montmollin wrote Excel Writer last year in Ada to help build a simulation spreadsheet with hundreds of elements. “In such a case, a CSV file would be not only too austere, but would lead to confusions in absence of proper numeric formats and a little bit of page formatting.” He uses the GNU Ada Translator (GNAT) as his compiler during development.
de Montmollin licenses the software under the MIT license, because “it seems to be one of the most liberal licenses available. I don’t care if people sell closed source software using Excel Writer; I would be more concerned that people not be blocked by some license issue they didn’t anticipate.” Similarly, he hosts the project on SourceForge.net because “it is the most open-minded open source site, and with amazing services, especially source control, releases, and trackers.”
de Montmollin plans to continue to develop Excel Writer to emulate more versions of Excel and support more contents, depending on users’ needs. He welcomes feedback via SourceForge forums.