Excel writer recommendations?

[regent]

Hello all.  I've been using PEAR's Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer for generating spreadsheets, and everything works fine, but there is the limitation that the only images you can insert have to be bitmaps.  This tends to make the filesizes of my spreadsheets enormous! 

 

So is there another excel writer that will allow the insertion of jpgs?

 

Thanks for any help.

[AV1611]

I just went down this path and here are the main things I encountered:

 

1.  You can only create a field that is < 255 Characters long

2.  You can create a "TSV" file, but give it an ".xls" extension and excel will open it, even with fields > 255, but you get into the whole " " issue if it's a text or number string, and problems if the string also contains a " in it, etc... If you don't ", then you loose leading and trailing "0's" on numbers, which was a problem in my case.

3.  You can create an ".ods" spreadsheet, and don't have to worry about any of the above, but that only works for OpenOffice, IBM Lotus Symphony, Etc... (Which is fine by me!).  You would still need to open the doc and resave it as .xls.

 

If you need code sample or whatever post.  Or just google .xls class, many are out there, and they are easy to use.