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My company has a Delphi 7 application that relies on Formula One spreadsheets (TF1Book) for a key part of the application.

Users are pretty happy with the functionality actually, but it looks very dated now, especially now we have a Microsoft 2010 style ribbon interface throughout the rest of the application.

My question is whether it's possible to override the paint events for the TF1Book? It doesn't seem to expose anything and the source code isn't provided.

Thanks!

sxthomson
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1 Answers1

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Formula One for Delphi is delivered as an ActiveX component. It is an excellent component, but it is somewhat aged now. In any case, you don't get the code, so you cannot make modifications. You are out of luck. You cannot change the appearance of Formula One.

My company used to use Formula One. We moved away from it a few years ago because we felt vulnerable without source code. We also had problems with the licensing of later versions of Formula One because the vendor wanted royalties which naturally we did not like. We anticipated 64 bit Delphi and took a decision to make sure we had source for all our external libraries.

We ended up using DevExpress ExpressSpreadsheet. It certainly looks more modern. And you can customise it. We are happy enough with it although the standard of coding is very low. We had to implement many bug fixes and performance improvements because the design was so bad. But, it is still probably the best option.

David Heffernan
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  • is this still true for the latest version of ExpresSpreadSheet? What version are you using at the moment? – whosrdaddy Dec 20 '13 at 15:21
  • @whosrdaddy So far as I can tell, ExpressSpreadsheet has had no serious development for a long time. I'm sure the code is as hopeless as it has always been. I've found countless awful errors. The most egregious was their rubbish and broken implementation of OLE container storage in which to house the .xls biff records. I removed all that code and replaced it with a simple call to `StgCreateStorageEx`! – David Heffernan Dec 20 '13 at 15:37
  • Have you had to implement any charting functionality with the DevExpress component? We actually already have a license for the DevExpress VCL package and, like you, have found loads of bugs in their code. – sxthomson Dec 20 '13 at 15:53
  • We don't do charting in our use of ExpressSpreadsheet. We do our charting with TeeChart. – David Heffernan Dec 20 '13 at 17:06