Web pages provide a plethora of information and mineable data. Unfortunately most of them are not using the XML based XHTML but the classic HTML. Therefore we decided to extend the ANKHOR XML parser to accept most HTML content.

With this extension it is now quite simple to e.g. extract all <img> references from a web page and convert it into a table.

 I have created a simple web crawler for testing purposes that walks through all reachable documents on a given domain starting at the root. It uses a while loop to iterate through the access depth. A HEAD request is executed in parallel for all resources that are reachable at this level and have not been accessed in one of the iterations before.

In the blog entry from March 28, we showed you how to exchange data between ANKHOR FlowSheet and traditional spreadsheet applications using the clipboard or CSV files as intermediate data format. However, the latest release 0.9.47 of ANKHOR FlowSheet provides a great new library that supports the direct import of XLSX and XLS files, offering immediate access to the data fields in the workbooks and even (within certain limits) the automatic conversion of cell formulas into FlowSheet macros. This means that the original spreadsheet can be automatically converted into a corresponding FlowSheet!

In this article we explain how to make use of the macros in the new "Spreadsheet Import" library.

When beginning to use ANKHOR FlowSheet, you may have the desire to use tables of data that you created with one of the "traditional" spreadsheet applications like Excel as a starting point. This short article shows you how to achieve this task, and gives an outlook on the planned features in this area for the upcoming releases of ANKHOR FlowSheet.

In its current state, ANKHOR FlowSheet does not support the direct loading of Excel sheets (this is planned for one of the next releases). However, two methods exist by which you can still import data from that application:

1. Exporting the Excel sheet as a CSV ("Comma Separated Values") file, and reading this file in ANKHOR FlowSheet with an operator.
2. Via the clip board, using Copy & Paste

We start with the first method. Save your current Excel sheet using the "Save As..." menu item, and selecting the "CSV" format from the "Save As Type..." drop down list: