Open Excel without MS Office

[wa4qms]

The very higher ups for the company I contract for, have decided that the new 'server' that handles the Progress ERP will not have Office 365 installed. What that means is that is any application developed that makes calls to read / write to an excel sheet will not work w/o asking for a log in I have been told.
And it is just not custom software that has been developed that will be effected.

I was wondering if anyone else has had this issue? I am waiting for test results from the IT department who are going to try and install excel only and see what happens. It would seem to me that using the normal 'code' to start the application there would be an option for including the user/password info. Any thoughts would be greatly apricated.
-Dennis- (Who is getting too old for this nonsense. )

 

[WinningJr]

Yes. Office 365 requires user logins (subscription) and caused us grief for unattended generation of reports using COM. We contacted microsoft and they replied that COM was not supported for unattended report generation - so no way (or no reasonable way) to pass the creds programatically that we could find. For a temporary work-around, we installed our old Office 2019 (not 365) on the server. Long term, I'm almost done rewriting our reporting framework to use Syncfusion XLSIO to create all our pivot, excel, workd, and pdf reports instead of doing it the old way.

 

[Cringer]

If you're creating and opening xlsx files then they're basically just compressed folders of xml files. There's documentation out there for them, or you can use tools that already exist. DocXFactory being the most likely candidate to use I'd have thought. GitHub - DocxFactory/DocxFactory: Cross platform C/C++ library with C#, Java, Python, Progress 4GL wrappers and command line tools for generating Microsoft Word .DOCX (OpenXML) files I believe it deals with xlsx files as well.

 

[wa4qms]

UPDATE: Management is deciding what they want to do. We can open the files just fine, just can't save and/or create any new ones. Thanks all.

 

[Osborne]

As Cringer posted, one option is to create Excel XML files, and although you can not create with advanced features they do not require any interaction with Excel.

Apart from DocxFactory, a pure Progress solution to create Excel XML files is to use xmlspreadsheet.p written by Tom Bergman. I thought I had this but cannot find it, however it is available here:

Using Xml To Create Excel File

Hello Everyone. Good day! I have tried the uploaded source codes that will create excel file thru xml here PEG Utilities Page. But then I have the following questions: 1. Can I insert titles? or other headers to the excel file? e.g. Accounting Department Username and Date Column...

www.progresstalk.com

I did find two basic examples of calling xmlspreadsheet.p and have attached these as well as something called xmlspreadsax.p that may help.

 

[wa4qms]

Thanks for the info. They are only to be on this system for about 18 or more months, and I feel they are not going to want to invest further.