AutoHotkey Community

Any way to read fields directly from an .XLS file without Excel?

Not using Autohotkey; .xls is a binary file.

However, if you tell Excel to export the file as .csv, AHK can read that.

Yes. If you haven't Excel, you can use the COM Standard Library and use ADO (ActiveX Data Objects), witch is part of the Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) by reading ADO COM - Database Query. You will need to know the connection string (someting like : "Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=C:\MyExcel.xls;Extended Properties="Excel 8.0;HDR=Yes;IMEX=1";") to connect to the database and at least a little of SQL command syntax (for example here) to achieve retrieving the data you want to. In this case, I think that you can't make calculations but only use Excel as a database. The use is in this case almost the same as reading an Access database without Access.

In the other hand, if you have excel and that you don't want it to be visible, but that it isn't a problem to use it, you can do the job with (again) the COM Standard Library and by looking at MS Office Automation Functions (via COM) [thanks Sean]. You connect to Excel (an existing instance or you launch it) and set it's "visible" property to false. You will need to know at least a little of VBA.

Si it's possible, but (very) hard if all that you red from me is an E.T language.

Good reading.
Hope it helps.

i could be wrong but i am relativly sure this still requires excell installed on the machine to work

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Formal request to Polyethene

May be you're right. I must say I don't know. To try... But if Excel isn't installed, how to get a CSV file from an Excel one ?

Perhaps you could use the Excel Viewer and automate it?
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=EN

Also, check out ODBC, it allows you to read Excel files. Lots of links out there, but some of the better ones are for using JDBC (Java) to read the Excel files. That's what we use, though I honestly don't know if you need Excel - all of our machines have Excel installed.

Regards,
Eric

as long as the data is all your after not the vba
you could use open office or excel viewer which are both free
odbc i believe relies on drivers that come with excel for excel files. Tho it may be posible to download those drivers for free.(never bothered looking)
I would just get excel viewer tho

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No matter what your oppinion Please join this discussion
Formal request to Polyethene

You could download OpenOffice at http://www.OpenOffice.org.
It will open and read .xls files, although you need to download something else that currently escapes me to open the openoffice files with excel. It is possible, however, I am misunderstanding the question

I am a scientific programmer and I had to process a lot of measurement data in XLS files.
Here you can find a free DLL and a sample program (C) :
http://perso.numericable.fr/hserindat/xlsread/
Good luck

Great. Can anyone think of a way to use that DLL directly in AHK? Or would we have to modify and compile the sample C++ code to make it output text and then read-in that text?

see this example of how it can be done -> http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=65941

See: DllCall()