DevExpress VCL Spreadsheet control (Coming soon in v15.1)

As Ray said yesterday when talking about the new Rating Control, he and I are going to take it in turns describing the new features and functionality in v15.1 over the next few days. Today, it’s my turn, so welcome to the new features in the ultimate in data analysis controls: the DevExpress VCL Spreadsheet.

Data Export

The first new piece of functionality for the spreadsheet isn’t really about the control itself, but about how it is used with controls in the rest of the VCL Subscription. In essence, we’ve now incorporated it as a principal component of our data export engine. This means that we now have one and only one export functionality for grid or tabular data, and this has allowed us to significantly simplify the data export engine's code and avoid code duplication when implementing new features, both of which are vital to a quickly changing feature set.

In particular, this merging of code provides the following features:

• Ability to export data to CSV files
• Ensuring cell number formats in the exported XLSX file are based on data cell display formats shown in the Grid, Tree List, Pivot Grid, and Vertical Grid controls
• Detail grid Views can now be exported to XLS, XLSX, or TXT files
• The progress of export operations can now be tracked, and aborted if necessary
• Custom encoding formats for strings exported to TXT or CSV files
• Ability to export images to XLS files, including those displayed by cxImageComboBox grid items

One consequence of this work is that the ExpressSpreadSheet Suite is now required for products – especially the grids and treelists – that provide export capabilities and will be automatically installed with them. Since the new spreadsheet was written to support later compilers only, this meant we had to drop support for older compilers.

Once DevExpress VCL v15.1 is released, the ExpressSpreadSheet Suite will be added to the ExpressGridPack and ExpressQuantumPack subscription packs. We will provide a free upgrade to the new SKUs to all customers that own an active subscription to these packs.

New functionality

The v15.1 release includes the following new features for the DevExpress VCL Spreadsheet Control:

• Ability to outline or group data in a worksheet. This gives your users a much better facility for analyzing data using the spreadsheet.
  
  
  
• A new built-in dialog for find and replace operations.
  
  
  
• Support for Excel template files (XLT and XLTX files).
• Ability to export an active worksheet to a TXT, XML, or HTML file.
• Ability to iterate through all generated cell objects.
• Support for the keyboard shortcuts that are available in Excel.

I’m sure you’ll agree these are some welcome new features (especially the data export enhancements). No doubt there are other features you’d like to see with the spreadsheet control, so please do let us know.

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