2008 Sep 18

XML-Spreadsheets for UBL v2.0's entire set of model spreadsheets are now available.

XML-Spreadsheets contain the same content as the spreadsheets but stored in XML form.  This facilitates use of other power XML tools and transformation engines such as XSL/XSLT, XML processors, browsers, AJAX, applets, etc to extract more value out of the spreadsheet content.

The format attempts to facilitate easy reference, processing and self-documentation.    The primary objective of XML-Spreadsheet is to preserve the content and structure of the source spreadsheet so that processing XML-spreadsheets is as near as possible to actually using original spreadsheet.

The format used in XML-Spreadsheets is extremely simple:

<Sheet>

  <Information>...</Information>

  <Row rowIndex="1">

    <Column rowIndex="1" columnIndex="1" columnLabel="Label A">...</Column>

    <Column rowIndex="1" columnIndex="2" columnLabel="Label B">...</Column>

    ......

  </Row>  <Row rowIndex="2">...</Row>

  ...

  <Row rowIndex="999">...</Row>

</Sheet>

This is generated by UBLish v2.0.0.kpo which is currently being packaged for early alpha release.  The alpha release would allow users to transform arbitrary spreadsheet file, or directory of spreadsheet files, directly into XML-spreadsheets.   Being multi-lingual-capable, UBLish v2.0.0.kpo will be able to extract localized spreadsheets from the various languages into which UBL was translated.  By storing these as XML format, the translation efforts would be able to be used in many more application areas and processing systems which have difficulty accessing original spreadsheets.

Chin Chee-Kai

UBLish Project Site (Download):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ublish

UBLish Web Site:
http://ublish.sourceforge.net/

UBLish Forum (SourceForge users only):
https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=863486

Kopio Project Site:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/kopio