XLConnect News
--------------

0.1-9	2012-03-08
	*	Vignette examples now run with ggplot2 0.9.0+
	*	loadWorkbook and saveWorkbook now expand paths using
		path.expand
	*	readWorksheet provides a new argument 'region' that allows
		to specify area bounds in an alternative way to startRow,
		startCol, endRow and endCol.

0.1-8	2012-02-10
	*	Moved to Apache POI 3.8-beta5
	*	Improved & extended package vignette
	*	Introduced xlcEdit for editing data.frames in an Excel editor,
		e.g. MS Excel.
	*	Columns in data.frames that have a type/class with no direct
		correspondence in Excel (i.e. everything which is not a logical,
		numeric, character or Date/POSIXt) are converted to character
		using as.character when writing to Excel rather than the 
		following error being thrown:
		"Unsupported data type (class) detected!"
	*	New arguments colTypes, forceConversion and dateTimeFormat
		for methods readNamedRegion and readWorksheet. colTypes allows
		to pre-specify column types (and force them in conjunction with
		forceConversion) when reading in data. forceConversion forces 
		conversion to less generic types (e.g. a string in Excel to a 
		POSIXt in R). dateTimeFormat is a format specifier used when 
		doing date/time conversions.
	
0.1-7	2011-10-19
	*	Moved to Apache POI 3.8-beta4
	*	Performance improvements when writing large xlsx files. This
		fix was implemented on the Apache POI side.
	*	An issue was fixed where the bounding box was not appropriately
		determined when using readWorksheet. The bounding box is now
		determined by first determining start and end row. Afterwards,
		for all rows between the start and the end row the minimum and 
		maximum column is determined.
	*	An issue was fixed where the named region was automatically
		expanded by one row when writing data to a named region without
		column headers.
	*	New workbook data extraction & replacement operators [, [<-,
		[[, [[<-. These are "syntactic sugar" for the already existing
		methods readWorksheet, writeWorksheet, readNamedRegion and
		writeNamedRegion.
	*	Support for saving workbooks to a new file ("save as").
	*	Support for querying the last (non-empty) row in a worksheet
	*	Support for including the row names of a data.frame when
		writing to a worksheet or a named region. In addition, when
		reading data from a worksheet or a named region a column
		can be specified that should be turned into row names.
	*	Extended use of setMissingValue. setMissingValue allows to
		define a set of missing value identifiers that are recognized
		as missing values when reading in data. The first element of
		this set is used as missing value identifier when writing data.
	*	Improvements to the definition of several generic functions &
		methods
	*	Improvements to the functions writeNamedRegionToFile &
		writeWorksheetToFile. Also, an issue was fixed with
		writeNamedRegionToFile where quoted sheet names (e.g. due to
		a whitespace in the sheet name) would have caused an error.
	*	Support for auto-sizing of columns.
	*	New functionality to append data to named regions and work-
		sheets: appendNamedRegion & appendWorksheet.
	*	Several internal changes on the Java side: removing Java
		logging, using java.util.ArrayList instead of java.util.Vector
	*	Functionality for dumping and restoring objects to/from Excel
		files (xlcDump, xlcRestore)
	*	Added a package vignette
	
0.1-6	Non-public release
		
0.1-5	2011-07-07
	*	Support for setting/getting cell formulas. See methods
		set/getCellFormula.
	*	Support for setting/getting the force formula recalculation flag on
		worksheets. See methods set/getForceFormulaRecalculation.
	*	Support for setting auto-filters via the setAutoFilter method.
	*	There is a set of new utility functions:
		- aref2idx, idx2aref: Converts Excel area references (such as A5:D14)
		  to row & column based cell references and vice versa.
		- aref: Constructs an Excel area reference from a specification of the
		  top left corner and the dimensionality of an object.
		- getReferenceCoordinates: Queries the coordinates of an Excel name
		  representing an Excel area reference (such as A5:D14)

0.1-4	2011-05-26
	*	An issue was fixed where cell styles would not be applied correctly.
	*	There is a new style action called NONE: This style action instructs 
		XLConnect to apply no cell styles when writing data. Cell styles are kept 
		as they are. This is useful in a scenario where all styling is predefined 
		in an Excel template which is then only filled with data.
	*	There is a new DATA_FORMAT_ONLY style action: This style action instructs
		XLConnect to only set the data format for a cell but not to apply any other 
		styling but rather keep the existing one. The data format to be applied is 
		determined by the corresponding R data type and can be defined by the user. 
		This style action may be useful in scenarios where Excel templates with 
		pre-defined styling are to be filled with XLConnect.
	*	Worksheets can be renamed with the new renameSheet method.
	*	The positions (indices) of worksheets can be queried & redefined using the 
		new methods getSheetPos & setSheetPos.
	*	Worksheets can be cloned using the new method cloneSheet.
	*	There is a set of new utility functions:
		- col2idx, idx2col: Converts Excel column names such as BD to indices and 
		  vice versa.
		- cref2idx, idx2cref: Converts cell references to row & column indices and 
		  vice versa.
	*	Setting a missing value string when writing missing values from R to Excel. 
		By default missing values result in blank/empty cells. This is to have a nice 
		type mapping between R and Excel. In some cases, however, you might want to 
		define a specific missing value string to be used by XLConnect when writing 
		cells representing missing values instead of blank/empty cells. This can be 
		done using the new method setMissingValue.
	*	The handling of error cells (cells that result in an error when trying to 
		evaluate them) has been greatly improved. With XLConnect 0.1-3 error cells 
		directly resulted in an exception. With XLConnect 0.1-4 this behavior can 
		be controlled using the onErrorCell method. By default error cells now result 
		in a missing value and the corresponding error cells will be reported via 
		warnings. The behavior may be changed to get an exception with the first 
		occurrence of an error cell.
	*	There is two new methods for merging & un-merging cells: mergeCells & 
		unmergeCells.

0.1-3	2011-02-27
	*	Initial Release
