Version 0.6.1a3

• Added Book.sheets ... for sheetx, sheet in enumerate(book.sheets):
• Formatting info: extraction of sheet-level flags from WINDOW2 record, and sheet.visibility from BOUNDSHEET record. Added Macintosh-only Font attributes "outline" and "shadow'.

Version 0.6.1a2

• Added extraction of merged cells info.
• pyExcelerator uses "general" instead of "General" for the generic "number format". Worked around.
• Crystal Reports writes "WORKBOOK" in the OLE2 Compound Document directory instead of "Workbook". Changed to case-insensitive directory search. Reported by Vic Simkus.

Version 0.6.1a1, 2006-12-18

• Added formatting information for cells (font, "number format", background, border, alignment and protection) and rows/columns (height/width etc). To save memory and time for those who don't need it, this information is extracted only if formatting_info=1 is supplied to the open_workbook() function. The cell records BLANK and MULBLANKS which contain no data, only formatting information, will continue to be ignored in the default (no formatting info) case.
• Ralph Heimburger reported a problem with xlrd being intolerant about an Excel 4.0 file (created by "some web app") with a DIMENSIONS record that omitted Microsoft's usual padding with 2 unused bytes. Fixed.

Version 0.6.0a4, not released

• Added extraction of human-readable formulas from NAME records.
• Worked around OOo Calc writing 9-byte BOOLERR records instead of 8. Reported by Rory Campbell-Lange.
• This history file converted to descending chronological order and HTML format.

Version 0.6.0a3, 2006-09-19

• Names: minor bugfixes; added script xlrdnameAPIdemo.py
• ROW records were being used as additional hints for sizing memory requirements. In some files the ROW records overstate the number of used columns, and/or there are ROW records for rows that have no data in them. This would cause xlrd to report sheet.ncols and/or sheet.nrows as larger than reasonably expected. Change: ROW records are ignored. The number of columns/rows is based solely on the highest column/row index seen in non-empty data records. Empty data records (types BLANK and MULBLANKS) which contain no data, only formatting information, have always been ignored, and this will continue. Consequence: trailing rows and columns which contain only empty cells will vanish.

Version 0.6.0a2, 2006-09-13

• Fixed a bug reported by Rory Campbell-Lange.: "open failed"; incorrect assumptions about the layout of array formulas which return strings.
• Further work on defined names, especially the API.

Version 0.6.0a1, 2006-09-08

• Sheet objects have two new convenience methods: col_values(colx, start_rowx=0, end_rowx=None) and the corresponding col_types. Suggested by Dennis O'Brien.
• BIFF 8 file missing its CODEPAGE record: xlrd will now assume utf_16_le encoding (the only possibility) and keep going.
• Older files missing a CODEPAGE record: an exception will be raised. Thanks to Sergey Krushinsky for a sample file. The open_workbook() function has a new argument (encoding_override) which can be used if the CODEPAGE record is missing or incorrect (for example, codepage=1251 but the data is actually encoded in koi8_r). The runxlrd.py script takes a corresponding -e argument, for example -e cp1251
• Further work done on parsing "number formats". Thanks to Chris Withers for the "General_)" example.
• Excel 97 introduced the concept of row and column labels, defined by Insert > Name > Labels. The ranges containing the labels are now exposed as the Sheet attributes row_label_ranges and col_label_ranges.
• The major effort in this 0.6.0 release has been the provision of access to named cell ranges and named constants (Excel: Insert/Name/Define). Juan C. Méndez provided very useful real-world sample files.

Version 0.5.3a1, 2006-05-24

• John Popplewell and Richard Sharp provided sample files which caused any reliance at all on DIMENSIONS records and ROW records to be abandoned.
• If the file size is not a whole number of OLE sectors, a warning message is logged. Previously this caused an exception to be raised.

Version 0.5.2, 2006-03-14, public release

• Updated version numbers, README, HISTORY.

Version 0.5.2a3, 2006-03-13

• Gnumeric writes user-defined formats with format codes starting at 50 instead of 164; worked around.
• Thanks to Didrik Pinte for reporting the need for xlrd to be more tolerant of the idiosyncracies of other software, for supplying sample files, and for performing alpha testing.
• '_' character in a format should be treated like an escape character; fixed.
• An "empty" formula result means a zero-length string, not an empty cell! Fixed.

Version 0.5.2a2, 2006-03-09

• Found that Gnumeric writes all DIMENSIONS records with nrows and ncols each 1 less than they should be (except when it clamps ncols at 256!), and pyXLwriter doesn't write ROW records. Cell memory pre-allocation was generalised to use ROW records if available with fall-back to DIMENSIONS records.

Version 0.5.2a1, 2006-03-06

• pyXLwriter writes DIMENSIONS record with antique opcode 0x0000 instead of 0x0200; worked around
• A file written by Gnumeric had zeroes in DIMENSIONS record but data in cell A1; worked around

Version 0.5.1, 2006-02-18, released to Journyx

• Python 2.1 mmap requires file to be opened for update access. Added fall-back to read-only access without mmap if 2.1 open fails because "permission denied".

Version 0.5, 2006-02-07, released to Journyx

• Now works with Python 2.1. Backporting to Python 2.1 was partially funded by Journyx - provider of timesheet and project accounting solutions (http://journyx.com/)
• open_workbook() can be given the contents of a file instead of its name. Thanks to Remco Boerma for the suggestion.
• New module attribute __VERSION__ (as a string; for example "0.5")
• Minor enhancements to classification of formats as date or not-date.
• Added warnings about files with inconsistent OLE compound document structures. Thanks to Roman V. Kiseliov (author of pyexcelerator) for the tip-off.

Version 0.4a1, 2005-09-07, released to Laurent T.

• Book and sheet objects can now be pickled and unpickled. Instead of reading a large spreadsheet multiple times, consider pickling it once and loading the saved pickle; can be much faster. Thanks to Laurent Thioudellet for the enhancement request.
• Using the mmap module can be turned off. But you would only do that for benchmarking purposes.
• Handling NUMBER records has been made faster

Version 0.3a1, 2005-05-15, first public release