XLS exported from Numbers prints warning

[mperham]

[16:23:42 /Users/mperham/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p125@theclymb3/gems/ruby-ole-1.2.11.4/lib/ole/storage/base.rb:395:validate!]
WARN   may not be a valid OLE2 structured storage file

We have an XLS fixture in our test suite. I opened it in Numbers, edited a header and exported it back out as XLS. The filesize changed from 45k -> 15k and now I see the warning message. All of our tests still pass so it seems like there's no problem reading the new file.

[aquasync]

Can you upload the file somewhere so I can see what is causing the warning?

[mperham]

If you put your email here or in your profile, I'd be happy to email it.

[aquasync]

It's aquasync@gmail.com.

[aquasync]

The warning is because ole.header.mbat_start == AllocationTable::AVAIL instead of AllocationTable::EOC (End-of-chain).

It appears Numbers is not following the spec (cf windowscompoundbinaryfileformatspecification.pdf, where that field is named _sectDifStart); you can see on page 6 it should be 0xfffffffe when there is no DIF. It works anyway, because when _csectDIF is 0 it doesn't try to read the chain.

The warning was intended to catch the case where there the count field is zero but a real chain entry is provided. AVAIL is harmless and can be ignored along with EOC.

In the meantime you may want to just set Ole::Log.level to Logger::ERROR to ignore.

[aquasync]

I just released 1.2.11.5 which won't emit a warning for this case.