ANN: xlrd 0.6.1a4 is now available

[John Machin]

An alpha release (a4) of version 0.6.1 of xlrd is now available from
http://www.lexicon.net/sjmachin/xlrd.htm and from the Cheeseshop
(http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/xlrd).

What is xlrd? It's a small (download approx 0.1 Mb) pure-Python
library for extracting information  from Microsoft Excel (tm) files,
anywhere Python 2.1 or later will run -- no need for Excel itself, nor
COM, nor even Windows. Further info: follow the links on the home
page.

This release incorporates the functionality of 0.6.0 which was not
released
independently for various reasons including the need to push ahead
with the
0.6.1 functionality.

New in 0.6.0: facility to access named cell ranges and named
constants (Excel UI: Insert/Name/Define).

New in 0.6.1: extracts 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.

There have been several changes made to handle anomalous files
(written by
3rd party software) which Excel will open without complaint, but
failed
with xlrd, usually because an assertion fails or xlrd deliberately
raises an exception. Refer to HISTORY.html for details. These have
been changed to accept the anomaly either silently or with a NOTE
message  or a WARNING message, as appropriate.

Many thanks are due to Simplistix Ltd
(http://www.simplistix.co.uk). for funding the new functionality in
0.6.1.

BTW, Feedback: general discussion on the python-excel newsgroup (sign
up at http://groups.google.com.au/group/python-excel?lnk=li&hl=en) or
mailto: sjmachin at lexicon.net preferably with [xlrd] in the message
subject.

Cheers,
John