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xlsx2abap – Read and edit your Excel files from ABAP

September 6, 2010 | 2,949 Views |
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Just two months ago I presented to SDN Community my open source project abap2xlsx – Generate your professional Excel spreadsheet from ABAP. With this blog I would like to announce you the release of xlsx2abap and abap2xlsx v2.0.

I’m very happy of the Community reaction to this project that gives me the power to quickly go on and extend my abap2xlsx and create the new xlsx2abap.

This cannot be real without the active contribution of some SDN community members: Gregor Wolf, Tomek Mackowski and Alvaro Tejada Galindo. Thank you guys!

So coming to the project what’s new?

Let’s start with xlsx2abap our first release of Excel xlsx file reader, it is capable to load an xlsx file and convert it into an ABAP object ready to be edited. The ABAP object is the same used by abap2xlsx so now you can read à edit à save your Excel file from ABAP. Is really cool!!!!

This first release limits the data load only to data, styles and other stuff will be included in next releases.

Many improvements are also done to the original project abap2xlsx in order to fulfill the community requests:

  • New automatic itab table binding, using the new Excel 2007 table style and field catalog
  • Cell horizontal alignment (center, normal, left, right)
  • Column merge
  • Column and row size
  • Column and row hiding
  • Support to different data type formatting (string, number, date and time)
  • OXML output compliant
  • Fix minor bugs and code improvements

And what’s next?

We are working hard in order to move our project into the new SDN Code Exchange (Public availability of Code Exchange for SAP TechEd 2010).

Currently we are looking for the next features to include in the next release such as:

  • Worksheet, Sheet and Cell protection
  • More style options (i.e. Rotation, Vertical alignment)
  • Sheet printing settings
  • Page layout settings
  • Hyperlinks
  • Pivot tables
  • Freezing panes
  • Locking columns and rows for scrolling
  • Read styles from an input file
  • …and…

A survey is active on this Wave https://wave.google.com/wave/waveref/googlewave.com/w+M57bGePbA,  your opinion is really appreciated.

Related post:

Follow #abap2xlsx news also on Twitter @IvanFemia

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23 Comments

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  2. Chris Paine
    When I tell some of the people I work with that using these tools in combination with the Web Dynpro Office UI element it will allow them to display and edit SAP data in realtime in Excel, some of them are going to wet themselves with excitement!

    The possibilities that being able to both read and write to a commonly used and well formatted file format are huge.

    You guys have done amazingly well! Huge kudos!

    (0) 
    1. Gregor Wolf

      Dear Bernhard,

      SAP will migrate the 23 most active projects to a public Assembla.com repository. The active contributors will get a real developer license and I think we will put abap2xlsx under the Apache 2.0 license.

      Best regards

      Gregor

      (0) 
    1. Ivan Femia Post author

      Hi,

      watermarks are not yet available.

      You can implement this feature and propose it at abap2xlsx.org in order to include it in the next release.

      Ivan

      (0) 
  6. Kenneth Moore

    Hello Ivan,

    Is it possible to copy a worksheet from several other spreadsheets and insert into another one?  For example, I have 5 spreadsheets with one worksheet each.  I want to create one large spreadsheet by copying those and inserting 5 new worksheets into one spreadsheet.

    (0) 
    1. Ivan Femia Post author

      HI Kenneth,

      yes it is possible. If you look at the demos you’ll figure out that it is pretty simple depending on the complexity of the workbooks.

      (0) 
  7. tom dupond

    Hello,

    The header and footer not correctly managed… Drawing a picture in the header not possible, loeading existing file does not take into account the header and footer…

    Best Reagards,

    Tom

    (0) 
    2. Ivan Femia Post author

      This functionality, as already mentioned on GitHub, is not yet implemented.

      If you want you can open a request in GitHub, as proposed by Gregor, and request for it or, even better, fork the GitHub project and propose an implementation.

      Best

      Ivan

      (0) 
      1. Bruno Esperança

        Hi Ivan,

        Ok, I think I got it. Is it the class ZCL_EXCEL_READER_2007 and related classes?


        It’s not meant to read normal .xls, is it?


        Thanks so much, sorry for the silly questions.


        Kind regards,

        Bruno

        (0) 

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