Thanks for this.  It is not urgent from my end. 

I've got no experience on .ods files, so I can't help with that.

Excel documentation says that cell references are disallowed as named ranges, so theoretically there should be no conflict.  I haven't tested that prohibition, and the maximum cell depends on version and maybe platform.  On my setup  it is XFD1048576 for xlsx files and IV65536 for .xls files.

I've noticed that a list of named ranges shows up occasionally in the xls pointer, but not when the file is opened.

One thing that might become important is the scope of the named range.  It is possible for a named range to exist for one worksheet in a file but not on any others. I haven't tested how Octave treats this, but the documentation seemed to ignore the issue.

Hmm I thought I posted another comment yesterday (Saturday Oct 5).

Again:
Never mind comment #3, I can confirm the bug and it is present for all spreadsheet I/O interfaces.
The bug is that any range name resembling a one-cell spreadsheet range (like 'A3, 'BF24'; IOW alphanumeric characters followed by an integer number) will be interpreted as that one-cell range. Ridiculous as it may seem, 'popData2021' fits the bill :-)

Hmmmm this bug must have been there from the very first implementation of named ranges in the spreadsheet I/O in 2015. Intriguing that it has been hit only now.

I think I know how to fix this but only after next weekend I'll have time for it.

chk_spreadsheet_support returns 0



(file #56474, file #56475)

I'm using the io package to import data from Excel *.xlsx files.
Windows 10, 22H2, 64 bit.  Excel 2007 installed.

It works as expected when the named range ends in a character. For Example,
[TestData test flag] = xls2oct(test,'DOR Format','Names')

and

[TestData test flag] = xls2oct(test,'DOR Format','DOR2Census')

both work as expected.

But

[TestData test flag] = xls2oct(test,'DOR Format','popData2018')

does not work.  It returns an empty 0x0 cell structure, but the flag = 1, as if it worked.

[TestData test flag] = xls2oct(test,'DOR Format','popData2022')

also returns an empty cell structure, but it should return an error message since that named range doesn't exist in the spreadsheet.

[TestData test flag] = xls2oct(test,'DOR Format','popData')

returns data, but it shouldn't since that named range doesn't exist.  The data it returns is from 'popData2015', which is the lowest numbered popData range on the spreadsheet.

If I rename the range in Excel to end in a character, such as 'popData2021x', then it seems to work correctly.  To get this to work I need to save the xlsx file, then xlsclose the file in Octave, then re-open it with xlsopen.

[TestData test flag] = xls2oct(test,'DOR Format','popData2021x')

works as expected, returning correct data, and
[TestData test flag] = xls2oct(test,'DOR Format','popData2022x')

correctly gives an error message that the named range doesn't exist.

This is the work around that I am implementing.  I thought that there should be some description of this issue so the next person  doesn't have to spend as much time as I did figuring out how to make this work.