mloiseleur,
any chance you could attach sample file to the issue?

Yes, here they are

Created attachment 39141 [details]
HTML table

Created attachment 39142 [details]
Table

You can try it by yourself.
Open it with Ms Excel, Open it with scalc and open it with soffice wrapper.
You will see easily the difference.

You might be please to hear that in OOo2.0.4 opening the files with scalc
(instead of soffice) will open them in Calc instead of Writer/Web.

So you could fix your problem by using 2.0.4 (when it's out) and register scalc
(not soffice) to handle files with extension "xls".

Thanks a lot. 
I'll wait to see it and I close the bug afterwards. The registry trick is
already made ^_^. I will try with *.xcu conf files too, it works well.

It still doesn't work in OpenOffice 2.1
Any clue on how I can help to fix it ?

Hi,

tried it with OOo2.1 and a OOFm4 build (upcoming OOo2.2) with the following
comandline :

{Officepath}\program\scalc.exe {path to file}ExportTSARExcel.xls

In both cases the file opens up in Calc !

So I close this Issue as worksforme. Please have a look at Issue 64271
especially the comments at the end.

Frank

closed wfm

Sorry to resume a closed thread (hope it's ok) but this issue is hitting me as well.

To be more precise, my problem is related to opening web URLs pointing to a HTML
table.

For example there is an attachment here
(http://www.openoffice.org/nonav/issues/showattachment.cgi/39142/ExportTBOI.xls)
which I'm unable to open properly with OO 2.3 on Linux: if I click on that URL
the browser correctly prompts me to open with Calc, but then all I get is the
"Text import" dialog, which obviously won't work for an HTML table.

Note that the same happens if I save the file locally an try to open it with
Calc; it only works correctly if I change the local file extension to HTML (and
then Right-click -> Open with -> Spreadsheet).

Is this issue fixed in the latest OO release? If not, I think it's something
that should really be addressed.

Alessandro

does not work in 2.4 nor dev300_m17

The mentioned file isn't a MSExcel file, it is a HTML which has been renamed.
Excel tries to load it with its filter so does OOo but the default filter for
OOo is WriterWeb => works as designed closed as worksforme

closed because worksforme

->oc :
  You're nearly right. There's a subtle difference : it's an html _table_ file,
that's why some users expect it to open in Calc, and not in Writer.
  For some people, Writer is an editor for textual html and Calc is an editor
for html sheets.

> works as designed closed as worksforme

Mmmh... well, ok but consider the following:

1) Web applications often rely on this functionality. I discovered this
"problem" while modifying one of my apps: I have several HTML table reports that
I have to "export" to spreadsheet and the easiest solution was changing the MIME
header (to application/vnd.ms-excel) and I was practically done without touching
anything else in my code.

2) That's how MS-Excel works: I understand this is of little or no interest to
you, but it's what the end users probably expect.

Thanks for your time, and I hope you will reconsider your decision.

Alessandro