I would like to get data from .xls files without manually opening Excel. One possibility is to use COM automation.
There are the com-1.2.3 and hdirect packages, but I can't find any examples of how to use these packages with Excel.
Does anyone have a solution for this?
With something like this, if your needs are relatively simple, I've found that it's more straightforward to find/write a command line executable that just pulls out a csv from the xls file. Then you invoke that executable from haskell, and proceed with its output from there.
In Ruby, I use rjb (ruby java bridge) and use a library from Java for excel (e.g. JExcelAPI as explained in http://www.slideshare.net/weyus/rjb).
It seems that there are some Java bridges for Haskell? http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applications_and_libraries/Interfacing_other_languages#Java Though I have no experience with them...
I wonder whether that's the best solution...
Now there is also xlsx on Hackage (for the Office Open XML xlsx format), although I haven't yet tried it myself.
