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<div class="title">The background story for FreeXL </div> </div>
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<div class="textblock"><p>Where, when and why a new free software library was born...</p>
<p>At the end of April 2011 Markus Neteler [<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Neteler">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Neteler</a>] and I (Sandro) were in Udine in Northern Italy, attending the annual Italian gvSIG Users conference. So, on a lovely hot and sunny spring evening, accompanied by a picturesque sunset, we were sitting in the town centre in the pleasant Piazza Matteotti aka Piazza San Giacomo, peacefully drinking some spritz while eating chips and peanuts.</p>
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<p>You'll have to admit, it was a really dangerous situation: as a general safety rule, never let two developers sit idle for too long. Some odd and crazy idea will inevitably occur to them (of course, drinking too much spritz can contribute as well).</p>
<p>Markus was desperately attempting to convince me that implementing a VirtualTable driver for SpatiaLite supporting direct SQL reading ofExcel .xls files was a good initiative. Surely it would be useful for many users. I strongly resisted, fiercely fighting and rejecting such idea, on the basis that attempting to read proprietary closed formats such as Excel was a complete nonsense, and probably a very difficult if not impossible task.</p>
<p>At the end of this very animated discussion, Markus pronounced the magic spell that suddenly convinced me about the absolute validity of his suggestions: <em>I can raise some funding for this project</em> After hearing such wise and significant words from Markus I immediately realized that developing a new driver for accessing Excel .xls documents surely was an exciting and useful task after all.</p>
<p>So FreeXL / VirtualXL was conceived at that exact moment, and slowly began its development cycle. </p>
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