Lately I see a lot of people confused by using Ren’Xel Plus and seeing that they can’t export to excel. I commented this on the page and described that Plus did not generate an excel file, but its free and open source version “Ren’Xel Classic”, so to avoid more problems I added support for the xls file. This format is not compatible with Classic or Plus after being generated, to use it with Ren’Xel Plus (and generate the rpy files) you must save the file as .xlsx (xml) from LibreOffice or any spreadsheet editor and the sheet must have the name “Sheet1” so you can use it in Ren’Xel Plus (creating a new workspace and loading the xlsx).

Why does it generate XLS and not XLSX? Well, the libraries that generate XLSX are difficult to include in Ren’Xel and more so to be compatible with RyunixJS, so we included the XLS format (which can be opened in LibreOffice or similar) to facilitate the inclusion of the excel format to Ren’Xel Plus.

Why didn’t Ren’Xel Plus generate an excel file? Basically because renxel already took care of that, it loaded the .tab as a csv file and converted it to json to be used internally to show you the editor. I didn’t see the need to include it for this reason, but as I see confusions I decided to add the XLS format.