Microsoft Excel

[gman]

Hello, I am new to SlickEdit and I purchased the product under the assumption that I could search Microsoft Excel files,  How do I do this without have to change them to text or something.

THanks

[Tim Kemp]

SlickEdit is a programmer's text editor, not a binary file search tool. That said, you can open the Excel file in hex mode and examine it, including searching for contents. Unless you are doing that to help understand the file format while writing a parser, you'll probably be disappointed with the results.

[Dan]

I suppose you could export the Excel file as a comma separated file, and search that with SlickEdit.  I don't know if that helps.

[Tim Kemp]

@Dan, I'm pretty sure @gman is looking for some sort of built-in Excel support. He said,

How do I do this without have to change them to text or something.

[Dan]

@Dan, I'm pretty sure @gman is looking for some sort of built-in Excel support. He said,

How do I do this without have to change them to text or something.

Yes, I overlooked this.  Oops.

[Clark]

Interesting.... The Excel ".xlsx" extension is really a Zip file with a bunch of .xml files. I've modified SlickEdit's recognition of .zip and .jar files to include .xlsx files as well for 19.0.2 which will likely be available for beta test next week.

With this change, from the find dialog you can specify "book1.xlsx\" for "Look in:" and "*.xml" for "File types:", turn on "Look in subfolders" to recursively search through the .xml files in the Zip file.

Problem: There currently isn't a way to specify "mydir\" for "Look in:" and have the find dialog recurse into all Zip format files (at least not yet). This means you have to specify each Zip folder individually (in this case each .xlsx file). The "Look in:" text box does support multiple folders so you could specify "book1.xlsx\;book2.xlsx\;book3.xlsx\ etc." but this may be too crude.

What we need is a check box "[ ] Treat Zip files as a directory of files". I've wanted this feature myself. Given SlickEdit's current file system engine, this feature is trival to add globally but we need to be able to specify this for a specific recursive list (not easy). At some point, we will have a go at this but we don't have a time table for this yet.

[Clark]

19.0.2 will have a new "Look in zip files" check box which will allow you to search through the files contained in zip files (.zip, .jar, .xlsx, .docx). So if you have a directory of zip/jar files (or directory of excel or word files), you can search through the files they contain. If you add a zip file to your project, this new check box doesn't support that yet. It only supports directory specs.

With 19.0.2 you will be able to search through your Excel spread sheets or word documents.

[hs2]

Isn't that cool  Clark ++HP
HS2