In A-Shell 6.3.1500, the module AXL ("axle") was added to A-Shell. AXL ("A" from A-Shell and "XL" from Excel or XLS{X}* file format) is the licensing and incorporatation of a third-party library of spreadsheet functions called "LibXL." The purpose of including this library and its extensive tools for spreadsheet generation and manipulation is to make it easier—and in some cases, possible at all—for developers to produce user-friendly spreadsheets for use outside of A-Shell. Spreadsheets may be created by two different means:
CSV2XL: This is a modestly capable implementation of LibXL which allows developers to take existing CSV files—i.e., those they have already been creating using A-Shell—and convert them into full-blown spreadsheets using fonts, colors, headings, number formats, etc. Since probably 90% of users and 90% of spreadsheets use a fairly small set of spreadsheet functions and capabilities, CSV2XL presents a simple means to generate basic spreadsheets. It incorporates the several most useful functions and ignores the rest of the library. The idea behind CSV2XL is to provide a tool that is limited in scope—i.e., simple to use and master—which meets most of the needs of most of the users most of the time.
AXL: This is the full function library, packaged appropriately and incorporated into A-Shell. Developers can use LibXL to build spreadsheets with virtually any degree of complexity and using any/all of Excel's vast functionality, and can also read and modify existing spreadsheets. It consists of approximately 125 functions with which developers can specify or change every aspect of a spreadsheet.
* AXL, including CSV2XL, supports both the old Excel file format XLS and the new file format XLSX. All references in this documentation to one or the other file formats should be understood to apply equally to the other format, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
