dunbarx wrote:I will try the several suggestions, and perhaps save the spreadsheet as text-only and see if that helps. But why on earth should I need to?
Applications use formats that support the full range of savable data. In a word processor, for example, in addition to the text there may be style runs, pagination, indexes, and other elements. In a spreadsheet, in addition to the data contained in the cells there may be data about the formatting of the contents those cells, the formatting of the cell borders, formulas, charts, and perhaps even multiple sheets containing many different collections of all of those.
There's a lot more to a spreadsheet than the cell contents.
I have no issue writing data to a spreadsheet, where all comes out just fine. Why cannot I simply read back the same data in the same format I just wrote?
How did you write the data to a spreadsheet?
My hunch would be that you wrote a plain-text file, and then imported it, yes? If so, the format on disk is not the format in memory, and if you then save the imported data to a native Excel-format file you'll see the same Zip format as when making a new file in Excel.
Think of it like importing a text file into a field: if you wrote an app that allows you to open a text file and it creates a stack and a field within it to display the text, if you then save the stack file you'll have a lot of other things in that file beyond just the textual contents of the field.