Check if Excel file saved in compatibility mode without using Excel - excel

Question

I have recently been experimenting with perl and some modules to read Excel files and in particular the format of thier cells.
For example I wrote a piece of perl code that used the module ParseExcel to read a cells background colour. However while testing I noticed that for certain files the colour returned by my perl program did not match the colour reported by Excel. Eventually I found the reason for this was that the file I was reading was a .xls file saved in compatibility mode. Basically the creator of the file had used the functionality of Excel .xlsx type files (2007+) to colour some of the cells and then saved the file with the old .xls file extension that did not support the colours chosen.
So my question: Is there any way to tell whether a given .xls file (or any other old Excel file format) has been saved in compatibility mode without usung Excel to find out? The reason I ask is that I am working under a linux environment and can't use any windows tools to analyse the files.
Furthermore, if one could identify that a given Excel file has, indeed, been saved in compatibiity mode is there any way of knowing how the original colours were mapped to the ones that my program is telling me?
Many thanks for any help on this.

Answer 1

I do not think that you can do this using Spreadsheet::ParseExcel. I have tried saving an xls file with a color from an .xlsx and saving it with 2003 compatibility. Then comparing it with an empty .xls of 2003 and I do not see any difference in my files.
You can try the following code to debug it with your own files trying to find a difference that you could use:
use strict;
use warnings;
use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;
use Data::Dumper;
use JSON;
use Test::More tests => 1;
my $file_1 = 'test_xls.xls';
my $file_2 = 'compat_xls.xls';
my #files = (
$file_1,
$file_2,
);
my #workbooks;
foreach my $file (#files){
print("\n\nReading $file\n");
my $parser = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel->new();
my $workbook = $parser->parse($file);
# print Dumper($workbook->{PkgStr});
delete $workbook->{PkgStr};
delete $workbook->{File};
delete $workbook->{Worksheet}->[0]->{MinRow};
delete $workbook->{Worksheet}->[0]->{RowHeight};
delete $workbook->{Worksheet}->[0]->{_Pos};
delete $workbook->{Worksheet}->[0]->{MinCol};
delete $workbook->{Worksheet}->[0]->{MaxCol};
delete $workbook->{Worksheet}->[0]->{MaxRow};
delete $workbook->{Worksheet}->[0]->{Cells};
delete $workbook->{Format}->[62];
push #workbooks, $workbook;
}
my ($ok, $stack) = is_deeply($workbooks[0], $workbooks[1]);
my $diag = explain($stack);
print(Dumper($diag));