1.1 Overview

SpreadScript is a scriptable spreadsheet engine designed to provide spreadsheet processing solutions for the Web, or any application where the automated handling of spreadsheet data is required. With SpreadScript, native Excel and NExS spreadsheets can be created, read, written, and calculated from Perl, Python, or Tcl.

The SpreadScript engine is derived from the tried and true NExS spreadsheet for Unix and Linux. Its small footprint and tightly written C code make it ideal for the most demanding Internet or Intranet applications. With APIs for the most popular web scripting languages, SpreadScript makes it extremely easy to develop web applications for manipulating Excel spreadsheets.

Sample applications for SpreadScript include:

• Providing custom reports, such as financial statements, to customers in native Excel files.
• Collecting and processing data from employees, such as expense reports, which have been uploaded as Excel spreadsheets.
• Automatically emailing grade reports to students as Excel attachments.
• Generating daily inventory reports for management as Excel files.

Because SpreadScript is a complete spreadsheet calculation engine supporting native Excel formats, it provides capabilities that go far beyond those of other approaches, such as comma-separated-values files and simple Excel file writers. Some examples include:

• Visually pleasing output, with formatting control of attributes such as fonts, borders, column widths.
• Spreadsheet formula support, so generated reports may contain spreadsheet models and statistics (such as sums and averages) as computed values rather than merely static data.
• Live computation, so that scripted applications can perform their own ``what if'' analyses, or work interactively.