Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 52635
TAB-delimited text files with .xls extension should open in Spreadsheet application
Last modified: 2005-08-08 11:08:36 UTC
TAB-delimited text files with .xls extension have always been loadable directly in MS Excel as a regular Workbook. This is a _great_ thing, for it has been the favored way by many to interchange unformatted spreadsheets across operating systems (avoiding in particular the horrible inconsistencies with csv across different language/countries). Openoffice.org behaviour with such files is to force opening them in the word processor (OOo-writer), even if one does an Open/Import from the Spreadsheet application (OOo-calc). This is very wrong because it is both useless (no longer considered a table/spreadsheet) and incompatible with standard MS Excel behaviour with its _own_ file formats. Correct behaviour is to open _directly_ TAB-delimited text files with .xls extension in the spreadsheet application. Directly means bypassing the separator-recognition step (it must be tab if the file is text and the extension is xls).
Please read the discussion in issue 11802 and issue 45469. This issue is not a defect and as enhancement, I guess, it will be set to "wontfix" by the developers.
Here, we are not in the case of 11802 and 45469. We are talking about more than just a tab-delimited text file, but one that has the exact same extension (or mimetype) as a MS-Excel file. Such a file _IS_ an Excel file for all intents and purposes. The default behaviour of OOo with regards to _all_ MS Excel files (which Excel opens directly of course) is to open them directly in OOo-calc. The user should not have to tweak _any_ preference for that, it should be the default behaviour. So this really is a bug. Please also note that the suggestion in 11802 and 45469to use CSV rather than tab-delimited .xls files is _bogus_ because Excel behaves horribly across locales (In French, for example, CSV means semicolon-separated-values, so opening a french CSV in a en_US locale makes a complete mess). Excel is the real the culprit there, but the point is that CSV is a _bad_ idea to exchange unformatted spreadsheets if one wants to be interoperable with Excel.
Faking the extension will not change the file type. For example, you cannot open such a file in "Microsoft Excel 97 Viewer" and also the excel import filter of OOo will fail. You can set the extension to what you want, the file type will remain "text". To be an excel-file it needs a specific header and coding in a specific way. The file type detection of OOo is designed not to use the extension but the real file type. So it works as designed and therefore is no defect. You can force OOo to open it in Calc, when you select the correct filter in the file open dialog. But be aware the correct filter is not "Excel" but "Text csv". If you don't like this behavior (as other people who use SAP), you have to write an enhancement. There are already two enhancements which concern with this problem, issue 8967 and issue 23078. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 23078 ***
and closed