Build 3.0.0.48 of xlsgen adds support for fractions in number formats.

Fractions is a display mechanism in Excel where, instead of showing 5.25 for instance, you can show 5 1/4 by simply choosing this number format : #\ ?/?.

The ?/? expression is meant to say : a fraction up to one digit for the numerator and the denominator. The expression can support any number of question marks, and you can also specify the denominator, as in ?/50. Excel computes the numerator and denominator. xlsgen did not do this so far. Until this build, that is.

Note that Excel's own algorithm for inferring fractions isn't always the best. In principles, Excel is supposed to compute and display the best estimate fraction whenever there is no strictly equal numerator/denominator matching the fractional value. However, if you decide to enforce this to say 8.36 with the expression #\ ?/?, i.e. best one-digit fraction, Excel will show 8 1/3, even though the best one-digit fraction actually is 8 3/8, since 1/3 = 0.33333... which is more distant to 0.36 than 3/8 = 0.375 is. This can be seen as a bug in Excel, and xlsgen does not try to mimic this bug. This bug is not fixed in Excel 2013.



Also in this build, a couple improvements related to formatting labels (i.e. number formats rendered in cells), and also date/time parsing.