From hannes.wyss_at_gmail.com Mon Oct 13 15:49:28 2008
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2008 15:49:28 +0200
From: Hannes Wyss <hannes.wyss_at_gmail.com>
To: ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
Cc: Zeno R.R. Davatz <zdavatz:at:ywesee.com>
Subject: [ANN] spreadsheet 0.6.0 Released

spreadsheet version 0.6.0 has been released!

* <http://spreadsheet.rubyforge.org>

The Spreadsheet Library is designed to read and write Spreadsheet
Documents.  As of version 0.6.0, only Microsoft Excel compatible
spreadsheets are supported. Spreadsheet is a combination/complete
rewrite of the Spreadsheet::Excel Library by Daniel J. Berger and the
ParseExcel Library by Hannes Wyss. Spreadsheet can read, write and
modify Spreadsheet Documents.


Changes:

### 0.6.0 / 2008-10-13
Initial upload of the shiny new Spreadsheet Gem after three weeks of
grueling labor in the dark binary mines of Little-Endian Biff and long
hours spent polishing the surfaces of documentation:

* Significantly improved memory-efficiency when reading large Excel
  Files
* Limited Spreadsheet modification support
* Improved handling of String Encodings
* Runs on top of the ruby-ole Library


Roadmap:

0.7.0: Improved Format support/Styles
0.7.1: Document Modification: Formats/Styles
0.8.0: Formula Support
0.8.1: Document Modification: Formulas
0.9.0: Write-Support: BIFF5
1.0.0: Ruby 1.9 Support;
       Remove backward compatibility code


Backward Compatibility:

Spreadsheet is designed to be a drop-in replacement for both
ParseExcel and Spreadsheet::Excel. It provides a number of
require-paths for backward compatibility with its predecessors. If you
have been working with ParseExcel, you have probably used one or more
of the following:

  require 'parseexcel'
  require 'parseexcel/parseexcel'
  require 'parseexcel/parser'

Either of the above will define the ParseExcel.parse method as a
facade to Spreadsheet.open. Additionally, this will alter Spreadsheets
behavior to define the ParseExcel::Worksheet::Cell class and fill each
parsed Row with instances thereof, which in turn provide ParseExcel's
Cell#to_s(encoding) and Cell#date methods.
You will have to manually uninstall the parseexcel library.

If you are upgrading from Spreadsheet::Excel, you were probably using
Workbook#add_worksheet and Worksheet#write, write_row or write_column.
Use the following to load the code which provides them:

  require 'spreadsheet/excel'

Again, you will have to manually uninstall the spreadsheet-excel library.

If you perform fancy formatting, you may run into trouble as the
Format implementation has changed considerably. If that is the case,
please drop me a line at hannes.wyss@gmail.com and I will try to help
you. Don't forget to include the offending code-snippet!

Enjoy!

Cheers
Hannes