BIFF Explorer
lazarus / 49-FPSpreadsheet

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wp · 2014-03-02 14:24

Trying to understand the inner working of the BIFF file format of
Excel I decided to write a BIFF viewer which detects the records of
the BIFF file and helps to interpret them. There are a few of them out
there in the internet, but none was working to my expectations.

The program ("BIFF Explorer") displays a list of the BIFF records
contained in the xls file along with name and explanation as described
in various documentation files (see "About"). Selecting one of the
records loads its bytes into a simple hex viewer; for the most
important records I tried to decipher the contents of the hex values
and displayed their meaning in a grid and a memo (page "Analysis").
For the other records select a byte in the hex viewer, and the program
will display the contents of that byte and the following ones as
integer, double, string (page "Values").

I am attaching the sources for this program, maybe it is useful to
other people trying to explore the inner structures of Excel files.
Please note that you'll need the VirtualTreeview-new package from
Lazarus-ccr in order to compile.

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BigChimp · 2014-06-21 11:48

wp committed the BIFF explorer to the fpspreadsheet SVN repository so
the newest sources can be found there...

See
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/FPSpreadsheet#Subversion