Release of version 0.3a1 of xlrd (Excel read) package

[sjmachin@lexicon.net]

The first publicly-released version of the xlrd (Excel read) package is now available for 
download from:
* http://www.lexicon.net/sjmachin/xlrd.htm
* PyPI (Windows installer only; unresolved problem with uploading source-distribution 
zip file)
 
Purpose: Provide a library for developers to extract data from Microsoft Excel (tm) 
spreadsheet files. It is not an end-user tool.
 
Platform: Any. You don’t need to be on Windows. If you are, you can avoid hassles with 
approaches like COM, ODBC, save-as-CSV, etc
 
Python requirements: Works with Python 2.2 or later. There are no dependencies on 
modules or packages outside the standard Python distribution.
 
Versions of Excel supported: 2004, 2002, XP, 2000, 97, 95, 5.0, 4.0, 3.0.
 
Features:
* Strong support for handling dates, and documentation of Excel date problems and how 
to avoid them. 
* Unicode aware; correctly handles "compressed" Unicode in modern files; decodes 
legacy charsets in older files (if Python has the codec). 
* Extracts all data (including Booleans and error-values) 
 
Exclusions: xlrd will not attempt to decode password-protected (encrypted) files. 
Otherwise, it will safely and reliably ignore any of these if present:
* Anything to do with the on-screen presentation of the data (fonts, panes, column 
widths, row heights, ...) 
* Charts, Macros, Pictures, any other embedded object. WARNING: currently this 
includes embedded worksheets. 
* Visual Basic (VBA) modules 
* Formulas (results of formula calculations are extracted, of course) 
* Comments and hyperlinks 
 
WANTED: *ALPHA* testers with:
* bigendian platforms, and/or
* Excel 95 (or earlier) files created in non-Latin1 locales
 
Feedback: mailto: sjmachin at lexicon.net preferably with [xlrd] in the message subject.
 

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