Reading hard Excel files

[startz]

Excel files are unfortunately often designed to be read by people rather than computers. An example is attached. Any chance of EViews getting being able to read something like this in future iteration?

digest of education tabn174.xls

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[EViews Chris]

To be honest, I doubt we'll be reading that file in fully automatically any time soon. There are just too many oddities.

There is one complication that we might be able to address in the future which is the use of empty lines. In the current code we use these to mark out where each data table ends, but we might be able to add an option to ingore empty lines in an Excel spreadsheet. (We have an option like this for raw text files.)

A human would still probably have to set this option though: at the end of the day, your brain is using the names of the U.S. states and/or the way the formatting lines have been drawn to tell that all the data is a single table. Both of these are fairly hard for us to pick up automatically.

[startz]

To be honest, I doubt we'll be reading that file in fully automatically any time soon. There are just too many oddities.

There is one complication that we might be able to address in the future which is the use of empty lines. In the current code we use these to mark out where each data table ends, but we might be able to add an option to ingore empty lines in an Excel spreadsheet. (We have an option like this for raw text files.)

A human would still probably have to set this option though: at the end of the day, your brain is using the names of the U.S. states and/or the way the formatting lines have been drawn to tell that all the data is a single table. Both of these are fairly hard for us to pick up automatically.

Perfectly reasonable, I'd settle for a few extra manual controls.