Mike Stephens wrote in post #999926:
> Will James wrote in post #999789:
>>the above seems to require win32ole, for which,
>> if I'm not mistaken, you need office to be installed on the system.
>
> I'm intrigued - how are you running Excel to get it to calculate
> formulae if it's not on your computer?
>
> As it happens, I don't think win32ole has got anything to do with Office
> anyway. It's to do with OLE, which is a Windows feature. Excel happens
> to present an OLE object model.

There are alternatives to office (i.e. openoffice) which allow you to
work with excel spreadsheets but don't provide the necessary COM objects
or whatever it is that's needed to use some features of certain
libraries or modules in certain languages. I think to do:

class ExcelConst
end
WIN32OLE.const_load(excel, ExcelConst)

or

excel = WIN32OLE::new('excel.Application')

you do need to have excel installed. I remember in perl, to do stuff
like:

use Win32::OLE qw(in with);
use Win32::OLE::Const 'Microsoft Excel';

you need to have excel on the system. I'm not a professional programmer
(these days, I mostly program to automate a lot of painful data
crunching tasks that would take ages to do by hand), so some of this is 
a bit beyond me...

Chuck - thanks. It's too bad that the formula stuff isn't implemented
yet, but could there be some clever workarounds to force or trick excel
into evaluating?

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