NEWS for package xlsx

Changes in version 0.5.0 (released 2012-09-23)

 o New functionality: Introduce the concept of CellBlock to allow
 faster writes/updates of cell blocks.  Writing a spreadsheet is
 now +50% faster for medium sized spreadsheets compared to version
 0.4.2.  This functionality allows you to style a block of cells much
 easier than before.  Thanks to Alexey Stukalov for his significant
 contribution on the Java side and for the original impetus.

 o Absolute paths are no longer needed for saveWorkbook and friends.
 Reported by Mike Cheetham.

 o Functions write.xlsx, write.xlsx2 now allow you to create xls
 documents too.  Previous versions only allowed xlsx documents. 

 o Bug fix: read.xlsx2 doesn't read an extra empty column anymore.
 Also colClasses were not mapped correctly to the corresponding
 colIndex. 

 o Deprecated: getMatrixValues.  Use the readColumns function instead.  


Changes in version 0.4.2 (released 2012-02-08)

 o New function readRows() similar to readColumns() for reading
   accross the columns. 

 o Removed a stray browser() in function .guess_cell_type


Changes in version 0.4.1 (released 2012-01-22)

 o Added a test for file existence in loadWorkbook.  If file does not
   exist, the error message from read.xlsx, read.xlsx2 and
   loadWorkbook is now more informative.  Also added path expansion in
   file names. (Suggested by Dirk Eddelbuettel.)

 o Fixed bug in addDataFrame to allow it to add a df to existing
   sheets, not only to new sheets. 


Changes in version 0.4.0 (released 2012-01-15)

 o BACWARDS INCOMPATIBLE CHANGES!  A complete rewrite of functionality
   to deal with cell styles.  Although I want to minimize API breaking
   changes, I belive that these changes are for the better as the old
   function createCellStyle had a whopping 11 arguments and was still
   incomplete.  The new functionality defines an S3 object CellStyle
   on which you can "add" DataFormat, Font, Fill, Border, Alignment,
   Protection.  On the note of backward compatibility, I don't want to
   promise anything as the package is still young.  As more people
   starts using the package, the API will freeze and if breaking
   changes are contemplated, a clear deprecation path will be
   provided.  

 o A Google project has been created http://code.google.com/p/rexcel/
   to expose the development branch of the package and manage the
   social interaction.  Please report all issues through this venue.
   Also a Google groups http://groups.google.com/group/R-package-xlsx
   has been created for announcements, etc.  Do register if you are
   interested in the development of the package.  It may give me more
   impetus to resolve an issue if I know many people are using this
   package. 

 o New function addHyperlink to add hyperlinks (urls, emails) to
   a cell.

 o New function addDataFrame to add a data.frame to an existing
   sheet.  It alows the user to style the header, rownames, or
   individual columns.  This is now used internally in the write.xlsx2
   function. 

 o New function getColumns to read a rectangular shape of cells into
   an R data.frame.  This is now used internally in the read.xlsx2
   function.  
 
 o Rename the default in read.xlsx, createSheet and removeSheet to
   sheetName="Sheet1" from "Sheet 1".  This makes it consistent with
   Excel 2007 names of an empty workbook.

 o Added ... arguments to read.xlsx2 function to mirror read.xlsx. 

 o Thanks to Neal Richardson and James Ward for submitting some
 code and suggestions. 


Changes in version 0.3.0 (released 2011-03-03)

 o Effort has been made to make all functions of this package to be
 agnostic between Excel versions.  You can now read, write and format
 files in Excel versions 97/2000/XP/2003 (not 95!) with file extension
 xls, in addition to Excel 2007 with file extension xlsx.
 Please report issues you encounter.  Note that Colors are limited for
 xls workbooks (see ?CellStyle).

 o Read strings in a different encoding.  Thanks to Wincent Huang for
 code contribution. Function ?getCellValue now has an encoding
 argument. 

 o Add support for Excel ranges.  Thanks to Wolfgang Abele for contributing
 preliminary code.  See ?Range. 

 o New function read.xlsx2 for reading spreadsheets.  By moving the
 looping into java one gets a speed bump of one order of magnitude or
 better over read.xlsx.  

 o Documentation fixes.

 o Move to version 3.7 for POI jars.  See http://poi.apache.org/.


Changes in version 0.2.4 (released 2010-10-20)

 o New function write.xlsx2 in which the writing is done on the java
 side.  Speed improvements of one order of magnitude over write.xlsx on
 moderately large data.frames (100,000 elements).  


Changes in version 0.2.3 (released 2010-08-26)

 o Fix the hAlign and vAlign arguments in createCellStyle.  The
 internal method call was lacking a cast to jshort.  Reported by
 Douglas Rivers. 

 o Fix getCellValue when you have formulas with String values (it
 assumed Numeric values and errored out for other types).  Support now
 Strings and Booleans.  Error out for other cell types.  Don't know a
 sound solution.  Reported by ravi(?) rv15i@yahoo.se.


Changes in version 0.2.2 (released 2010-07-14)

 o Added a colIndex argument to read.xlsx to facilitate reading only
 specific columns. 

 o setCellValue now tests for NA, and if value is NA, it will fill the
 cell with #N/A. 

 o Fixed bug in getCellValue.  It now returns NA for all the error
 codes in the cell.  It used to return a numeric code which was
 confusing to the R user.  Reported by Ralf Tautenhahn. 
 

Changes in version 0.2.1 (released 2010-05-15)

 o Fixed bug with write.xlsx.  It does not write colnames even if
 col.names=TRUE.  Reported by Ralf Tautenhahn.

 o Added an ... arg to read.xlsx that is passed to the data.frame
 constructor, for example to control the stringsAsFactors option. 
 

Changes in version 0.2.0 (released 2010-05-01)

 o Switched to POI 3.6.  This resulted in significant memory
 improvements but will still run into memory issues when
 reading/writing large xlsx files.  
 
 o Added addPicture function for embedding pictures into xlsx files. 

 o Added removeRow function for conveniently removing existing rows
 from the spreadsheet.

 o Added/Fixed comments for cells.  See ?Comment 

 o Fixed bug in read.xlsx for the case when the file contains only
 one column (issue reported by Hans Petersen), a corner case when
 drop=TRUE wrecked havoc. 

 o Fixed bug in createRow.  If rowIndex did not start at 1, it
 created spurious NULL entries.  


Changes in version 0.1.3  (released 2010-03-15)

 o Added indCol argument to getCells in case you want to get only a
 subset of columns. 

 o Added function getMatrixValue to extract blocks of data from the sheet.

 o Improved and expanded the unit tests.

 o On Mac, you cannot set colors directly using createCellStyle.  You
 can still do it manually, please see the javadocs.

Changes in version 0.1.2  (released 2010-01-02)

 o Fixed getRows, getCells so it does not error out for empty
 rows/cells.  Modified read.xlsx too. 

 o Added append argument to write.xlsx to be able to export to
 multiple worksheets of a file.  (Suggestion by rlearnr@gmail.com.)
