Office HTML: Excel headers and footers metadata erroneously transl

[rol]

We export data in Office HTML format, so that end-users may use it directly
with Excel.
According to the Office HTML official documentation (ofhtml9.chm), we use
&L, &C, etc. metadata within the text values of the headers and footers
styles to control the formatting of the headers and footers. Unfortunately,
the french version of Excel translates the metadata. The same escape &E means
different things in the English and French versions of Excel. The french
version of Excel thus doesn't display correctly our headers and footers. In
other places though, they didn't translate the text values of styles. For
instance, in the page orientation style, "landscape" is not translated. And
the documentation has a long chapter about internationalization issues
without mentionning that issue. It thus looks like a specific localization
error. Is it the same in other translated versions of Excel? Is it officially
considered as a problem by MS? Is there a work-around, such as being able to
tell that the meta-data is in English?

Thanks forward.

 

[NickHK]

Do you have export as HTML ?
Can you not export/create a real Excel (.xls) file ?
There are classes that can write binary Excel file, without the Excel being
installed. Not sure about their support of Header/Footers though, but you
could probably extend them, if you read up on the Excel/BIFF8 format <good
luck>.

NickHK

 

[rol]

We have our own html export, out of Office; it is several hundreds lines long
(beautiful C++ code ;-). It is actually based on a 3rd party library and,
well, I don't want to rewrite it from scratch.

We adapted it to add Excel specific stuff, mainly the page setup (headers,
footers, margins, orientation).

We also managed to have a same HTML file usable by all browsers and Excel,
with some tradeoffs. For instance, in IE, the header is instead shown before
the main data, on the first page, and the footer is shown after the data, on
the last page (we reverted the condition "[if gte mso 9]" of Office Html ;-).
In Firefox we unfortunately lose the header and footer but the main data is
still there.

As our export application lies on a server, we cannot query Office about its
language and the version of the OS is not very relevant (a lot of foreign
companies use english servers and local language workstations). Anyway, we
can't support all languages of Office, and we have customers in a lot of
countries.

Anyway, the problem also appears when directly exporting HTML from French
Excel and reading it with English Excel.
And even, partially, when saving a good old BIFF file (a real .XLS file)
from French Excel and reading it with English Excel.
I don't know about OpenXml.

I already knew, for years, about such issues with tab-delimited exports not
working between different languages of Excel, but I am quite surprised that
MS can't make "internatonal" Excel files.