ruby spreadsheet row background color

Question

I am trying to parse an excel spreadsheet using \"spreadsheet\". How could I get the background color of each row?

Answer 1

I was looking around for colors that you can use for the background color of a cell. For example:

Spreadsheet::Format.new({ :weight => :bold, :pattern => 1, :pattern_fg_color => :silver })

I couldn't find good info on which colors I could use for :pattern_fg_color. I decided to look for Excel help and found: http://dmcritchie.mvps.org/excel/colors.htm (at "The DOS assignments of the 16 colors").

It looks like the top 16 colors work:

0 Black, 1 Navy, 2 Green, 3 Teal, 4 Maroon, 5 Purple 6 Olive, 7 Silver, 8 Gray, 9 Blue, 10 Lime, 11 Aqua, 12 Red, 13 Fuschia, 14 Yellow, 15 White

Answer 2

I've just been trying to figure out the same, and seems like in the current version (0.6.5.9) of Spreadsheet gem the attribute of cell's background color is not supported in reader (you can only define background color in cells for writing).

Here's how to check all currently available cell attributes:

a = Spreadsheet.open('/folder/spreadsheet.xls')
puts a.worksheets[0].row(<rownumber>).format(<columnnumber>).inspect

After some experimentation however I figured out that not all of them are properly extracted. The good news is that the developers promise to implement better support for cell formats in future versions, so we just need to be patient :)

Answer 3

book = Spreadsheet::Workbook.new 
sheet = book.create_worksheet :name => 'Name'
format = Spreadsheet::Format.new :color=> :blue, :pattern_fg_color => :yellow, :pattern => 1
sheet.row(0).set_format(0, format) #for first cell in first row

or

sheet.row(0).default_format = format #for entire first row

you can iterate over each row/cell and apply style exactly where you want