Dear list members

I am pleased to annonce that I have just finished a native Excel
reader/writer. It's wrapped up in two packages: either "xlsReadWrite" (open
source) or the slightly beefed-up "xlsReadWritePro" (shareware). Working
with Excel data is now as easy as writing read.xls and write.xls.

Some more details:

- Infos and download: http://treetron.googlepages.com
- for detailed documentation pls. download and see: help files, DESCRIPTION
and README.
- I set up a newsgroup for technical questions and feedback:
http://groups.google.ch/group/supportR

- while it could be ported to other platforms, currently it is WINDOWS only
(see technical below)
- native means, that the file will be read/written in binary form (without
needing Excel). The format is Excel version 97 - 2003

- xlsReadWrite and xlsReadWritePro both are powerful:
  - handle data.frames and matrices/vectors of type double, integer,
logical, character
  - allow to select sheets
  - support colNames and a title
  - lets you skip rows at the beginning of the file

- the Pro version additionally:
  - lets you select subdata (columns, rows or pick cells) in Excel
  - can have colClasses (currently mainly for "rownames", more, e.g.
string-dates to come)
  - has xls.sheet: insert, select, delete sheets
  - has xls.open and xls.close: work with an xls-object in memory
  - has xls.info: gives information about file

- Technical/License:
  - it's written in Delphi (Pascal) and therefore Windows only
  - the open source compiler FreePascal potentially allows to compile for
other platforms
    (http://www.freepascal.org/wiki/index.php/Platform_list).
    [while I am interested in this for reasons of completeness, it's
unlikely that I will
    look into it soon without somebody funding. The Linux people probably
won't care anyway
    and just for macs, hmm, there are still much other things I'd like to
look into]
  - it's written by using the third party library
www.tmssoftware.com/flexcel.htm.
  - the open source version is GPLv2 and has an exception to allow linking
flexcel. Due
    to this exception the package as a whole is non-free and non-standard.
  - the shareware package has a trial period which allows to check out for
anybody for free.
    After the trial it has to be licenced for a small fee (or you can
reinstall it..., but I
    hope not many people will do that!). It is also possible to license the
source code.

Suggestions, bug reports and other comments are very welcome. If possible I
try
to incorporate them in the gold version.

Best regards,
Hans-Peter

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