[Haskell-cafe] COM and Haskell

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

> >    I'm interested in automating Excel using Haskell. I'm writing a little
> >    program for my wife and it'd be nice to fill out an Excel spreadsheet
> >    for her (with formatting so I don't think CSV will cut it). A bit of
> >    Googling didn't turn up anything interesting.

Does she need to manipulate the spread sheet afterwards? If not, you'd
be much better off producing an HTML table. You may also want to see
exactly what Excel can do when reading in a formatted HTML table, it
may give you CSV+formatting quite easily.

> If you application will be only small you'll be faster using VBScript.

VBA, not VBScript. VB 6 is the standalone programming language, VBA is
VB 6 with an API for Excel/Word/Office. VBScript is a scripting
version of VB, which should never be used (use JScript instead - its
more portable).

And I would recommend using VBA, I've done loads of Excel programming
- VBA is perfectly easy enough, the hard bit is the Excel API which is
quite big. If you move to Haskell you get a slightly better
programming language, with the same huge API, at the cost of a painful
translation layer to the API.

Thanks

Neil