| Discussion Forum: Thread 320416 |
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| | | Author: | Jokers74  | | Posted: | Apr 28, 2022 04:43 | | Subject: | What is this..? 1986??? | | Viewed: | 141 times | | Topic: | Help | |
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| Why is it you can download inventory in xls, but cannot upload inventory on xls..?
Am I missing something?
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| | | | | Author: | hpoort | | Posted: | Apr 28, 2022 06:48 | | Subject: | Re: What is this..? 1986??? | | Viewed: | 70 times | | Topic: | Help | |
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| In Help, Jokers74 writes:
| | Why is it you can download inventory in xls, but cannot upload inventory on xls..?
Am I missing something?
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Yep. Wrong year. In 1986 there would not be any Excel around. It is only in the
1990's that Excel became common, and the .xls format you refer to is from
1995. In the late 1980's it was more like Lotus-123 and Symphony.
The other thing you are missing is assuming that import and export are equally
easy/hard to build. They are not. To program an export function is much easier
than to program an import function, like 10% versus 90% time investment.
For this export, you just have to create a text file, write the column labels
and values into it in .csv syntax and rename it to .xls; this pretends to be
an Excel 1995 file which modern day Excel easily reads.
For import, you have to really be able to process the proprietary .xls file format,
or modern day .xlsx / .xlsb / .odt etc. formats, and most importantly: perform
all kind of data validation. Users will - inadvertently or otherwise - always
try to provide all kind of invalid data which you have to provide for.
So you are currently stuck with the one format that Bricklink has chosen to spend
more time on: .xml - You can create this from Excel too.
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