Keeping Legacy Excel Alive: Maintaining xlsReader for Go
Found a Go library for reading legacy .xls files. It had a bug. The original maintainer had stopped updating it. So I forked it, fixed it, and kept it alive.
Why this exists
The .xls format is ancient but stubbornly persistent. Go has excellent .xlsx support via excelize, but for the binary .xls format your options are limited. This library fills that gap.
What I did
Forked shakinm/xlsReader, fixed the parsing issue, and maintained the fork with ongoing fixes. Nothing glamorous. Just keeping a useful tool working.
Pure Go. No CGo dependencies. Reads the Compound Binary File Format directly.