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Worked on a world class radiotherapy piece of software. If you like 20 year old Delphi projects and pre C89 ... C, then come over! Xls export is probably a recent addition, xlsx support will most likely come no sooner than when Excel stops supporting xls.

Ten years ago people were still complaining about OOXML not being an open standard. Don't worry guys, I'm sure they'll make a reference implementation of the standard soon! I'm sure there were a few people waiting around for a "real" standard to come out before implementing XLSX support.

It was submitted for standardization in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML.

At that time the was less information about 97-2003 file formats (OLE2-based), but it was fixed around 2008-2009: https://alexott.blogspot.com/search/label/file%20formats

Excel has never worked well with external data.

Even the current version of Excel still inexplicably auto-converts long numerical strings to Scientific Notation.

Even xlsx files have caused endless headaches at my current workplace when they're large.