GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 352055
Avoid a warning on xls files generated by psiwin
Last modified: 2006-08-19 20:06:56 UTC
Please describe the problem: I am using gnumeric 1.6.3 with Excel files that have been converted from Psion sheet files by Psiwin. Every time I open one of these .xls files gnumeric displays a warning which says Unable to read MS property stream header I can then close the warning message and it opens the file fine but seeing as I plan to make heavy use of gnumeric this will become annoying. Steps to reproduce: 1. Open sample .xls file 2. Warning message displayed 3. Close warning message Actual results: Unable to read MS property stream header error gets displayed but file opens fine Expected results: No warning Does this happen every time? Yes Other information: Please e-mail me on allcoms @getridofthis@ gmail.com for a sample file which produces the warning
Created attachment 71206 [details] Open this file with gnumeric 1.6.x to see the warning message I'd like removed
Seems your file is not correct and is missing the field. Running ssconvert on it: ssconvert ms_stream.xls ms_stream2.xls gives a file which gnumeric opens without any warning. Supposing your files are all in a directory, you can convert all of them with the command line (using bash): for i in *.xls; do ssconvert $i converted-files/$i;done The files in the converted-files directory should be opened without the warnings. In all cases, this is not a gnumeric bug, but a bug of the program you used to generate your files.
I'd rather not just close this. We can tag it as an enhancement to work around the breakage.
psiwin is generating invalid zero sized property files. Although it is not technically correct, I've weaked the test in metadata_read to not generate an error if the file is of size 0. That is likely what most callers are interested in. Patch will be in 1.14.3