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Problems with Health and Safety Executive Excel file

Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2008 6:31 pm
by Qhunter
Hi,

The British Health and Safety Executive (HSE) have produced a fatigue calculator for shift workers which was produce in MS Excel.

Calc opens the file but the vast majority of formulai are missing and from within Calc it is unusable.

A friend of mine with Excel has downloaded the file to his machine and using Excel has confirmed that the spreadsheet functions correctly within Excel.

Would anyone be good enough to tell me what the problem is with this file and if there is anything I can do to get Calc to deal with it as intended?

I did contact HSE about the problem and they say they the spreadsheet was produced using an older version of Excel and they are aware that it doesn't work with the newest version. They also say there are no plans to update the spreadsheet.

I would appreciate any opinions you may have on this one.

http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrhtm/rr446.htm

Re: Problems with Health and Safety Executive Excel file

Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2008 7:21 pm
by Villeroy
The document can not work with anything but Excel alone because it utilizes Excel specific VBA macros.
I've rarely seen such a nonsense before. :o

Re: Problems with Health and Safety Executive Excel file

Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2008 12:01 pm
by huw
StarOffice and the Novell OpenOffice both have (different) VBA migration. I don't expect the free GooglePack StarOffice includes VBA migration, but someone here should know.

I don't know how good either of them are.

http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/sun ... k_together

http://pack.google.com/
I think http://go-oo.org/ is the Novell version.

Re: Problems with Health and Safety Executive Excel file

Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2008 2:53 pm
by Villeroy
Even if that stupid VBA-code runs, it would require extensive (expensive) teststing in order to prove that the results are always[/b] the same as in Excel. There may be quite hidden issues like line 592 in Module1 where CSng is used. StarBasic's CSng is broken.
I'm 99% shure that I could find several issues if I only had a working Excel and enough time in the same place.

Re: Problems with Health and Safety Executive Excel file

Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2008 4:53 pm
by Qhunter
I don't have Excel (I don't have a need for it) so I'll have to find someone with it on their machine.

Thanks for your input,

Qh