Excel
Excel is a planetary popular spreadsheet application by Microsoft. It includes formulas for complex calculations and provides rich charts, graphs and histograms based on underlying grid cell values.
We support Microsoft Excel directly in our products! You don't need separate drivers and can immediately create and read from Excel documents.
Besides holding data in a grid of cells, Excel relies on formulas to have a cell contain result based on values of other cells. As you change values, all cells with calculated values are updated immediately. Excel is a planetary popular solution for working with tabular data, as besides basic formulas, it includes a plethora of specialized functions for engineering, statistics and financials.
Excel's functionality can be extended by custom programming using the included VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) language. Such user-defined functions can be used in formulas as if they are built-in.
Old Excel versions (before Excel 2007) used proprietary binary XLS file format for the documents. Starting with Excel 2007, Excel uses OpenXML format for the documents and saves them with XLSX extension. XLSX document is basically a ZIP archive of a standard XML text document. For higher performance, XLSB binary format can be used instead.
Excel can import and export several data formats, though without any customization.
Any cell in Excel sheet can hold any kind of value - there are no column-enforced data types. When converting Excel to databases, we analyze each data cell value to choose optimal type to be used in a database for a specific column. Date values in Excel are in fact a simple decimal numbers (encoding number of days passed since reference date). Excel displays those numbers as actual dates only if appropriate cell format is used.