I'm using wxWidgets to write cross-plafrom applications. In one of applications I need to be able to load data from Microsoft Excel (.xls) files, but I need this to work on Linux as well, so I assume I cannot use OLE or whatever technology is available on Windows.
I see that there are many open source programs that can read excel files (OpenOffice, KOffice, etc.), so I wonder if there is some library that I could use?
Excel files it needs to support are very simple, straight tabular data. I don't need to extract any formatting except column/row position and the data itself.
I can say that I know of a wxWidgets application that reads Excel .xls and .xlsx files on any platform. For the .xlsx files we used an XML parser and zip stream reader and grab the data we need, pretty easy to get going. For the .xls files we used: ExcelFormat, which works well and we found the author to be very generous with his support.
Maybe just some encouragement to give it a go? It was a couple of days work to get working.