Reading/Writing to Excel BIFF file

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jon Brookins
  • Start date Start date
J

Jon Brookins

I'm reposting this question as the other post seems to have been
sucked into the net black hole.

I'll keep this short. I am trying to read and edit an Excel workbook
in its native BIFF format. I have documentation on the BIFF format,
and a utility (Biff Edit) to view the contents of the file. As I am
new to handling binary files, does anyone have any input on how to
work with BIFF files?

Here is the output of the first record in the \Workbook stream:

IdName|Id|Size|Stream Ofs|Data|Hex
BOF|0809|16|0|....F.Í.É€......|00 06 05 00 46 18 CD 07 C9 80 00 00 06
02 00 00

One of my questions is from C# how do I access this \Workbook stream?
Once I get that I suppose I just can use the offset to navigate the
other records, but I'm not sure.

Thanks everyone!

Jon Brookins
 
I don't know if I can give you information about Excel Biff specifically but
from a binary file standpoint this is what you can do.

There are multiple Stream types in C# you can use. I would recommend using
a FileStream for this. From there you can read the bytes from the file.

Lookup the FileStream class in MSDN there are some examples about reading
text and binary files.

-Casey
 
I'll keep this short. I am trying to read and edit an Excel workbook
in its native BIFF format.
Click to expand...

SyncFusion just announced a new product called "ExcelRW" which does
exactly that - handle Excel files natively, in a binary format, and
allows you to read and write those without having Excel installed
locally on the machine:

http://www.syncfusion.com/products/excelrw.aspx

Marc
================================================================
Marc Scheuner May The Source Be With You!
Bern, Switzerland m.scheuner(at)inova.ch
 
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