opening and amending an excel spreadsheet from filePro

[Kenneth Brody]

On 4/22/2010 10:52 AM, Dennis Malen wrote:
> We have the need to modify an excel spreadsheet received by third parties.
> Within the spreadsheet received from the third party is enough information
> to search for a filePro record. What we would like to do is to create
> processing that seamlessly opens the excel spreadsheet, looks up the record
> in filePro and then places the appropriate information in a specific column
> and line and closes the file ready to return to the third party.
>
> What we do now is create tab delimited file from the excel spreadsheet,
> import that into a filepro file, do the lookups and then export the
> information in a .csv file and return to the third party.

So you basically want filePro to update the spreadsheet in-place?  Here is 
the XLS file format specification:

 
http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/4/8/24862317-78F0-4C4B-B355-C7B2C1D997DB/[MS-XLS].pdf

 From there, it's SMOP.  :-)

(Note, however, that the document is 1,193 pages long.)

You can also grab the specs for all the MS-Office file formats from here:

 
http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/4/8/24862317-78F0-4C4B-B355-C7B2C1D997DB/OfficeFileFormatsProtocols.zip

 > Any thoughts or help would be appreciated.

Stick with having Excel modify its spreadsheets.  Or, at least, have filePro 
create Excel macros to do the job for you.

-- 
Kenneth Brody