Export to Excel not quite right

Support
1

Core Machine (Operating system/System info/Roon build number)
MacOS Catalina 10.15.1, Numbers 6.2.1

Network Details (Including networking gear model/manufacturer and if on WiFi/Ethernet)
Not applicable.

Description Of Issue
Export albums to Excel is not quite right. Document format appears to be off. When opened with numbers, Numbers thoughtfully puts the XML text into spreadsheet text cells rather than interpreting the XML document as a spreadsheet.

The MacOS file command reports that the file is …

 $ (base) trey:Desktop davey$ file LibraryAlbums-637105299654588100.xls 
LibraryAlbums-637105299654588100.xls: XML 1.0 document text, UTF-8 Unicode text
(base) trey:Desktop davey

The file is created with the .xml type which, by convention, indicates the old binary format. The file actually contains the new XML format which has a different extension.

Creating a simple sheet using Numbers and exporting to .xlsx gives an example. File command reports

(base) trey:Desktop davey$ file Numbers-xlsx-example.xlsx 
Numbers-xlsx-example.xlsx: Microsoft Excel 2007+
(base) trey:Desktop davey$

File text looks almost right. Something is causing the Workbook clause to parse incorrectly. Suggest running a validator to find the goof.

2

It’s a long-standing issue, and presumably low down on the priority list of things to be fixed…

4

Only Excel is opening the file. Google Docs also failed. I’ve not tried OpenOffice.

That sucks for the rest of the world. Recommend switching to XSLX using XSD schema and validating your results.

There should be a class library for this in mono but I don’t know enough about the library organization to run it down. Can find several mono examples out there of writing a workbook from a mono app.

5

Hi @David_Hamby — Thanks for reaching out. I’m bringing your feedback to the team and will let you know what they say.

6

This may help your developers. If they use Visual Studio Code, they can select plugins, then XSD, and VS Code will find a plugin, “XmlComplete” that will do partial validation. There are pretty clean tools for JSON to XSLX and CSV to XSLX. CSV is probably a sufficient option. Anybody wanting a workbook can take that option in their spreadsheet import. XmlComplete is selfcontained.

I’ve done this a lot in Python but not Mono. In Python pretty well to bring a collection of tuples out as a a collection of CSV lines. Python has a nice class for reading and writing CSV…

1 Like
7

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