Excel exporter converts numbers and dates to strings

[jhorstmann]

The excel export currently converts all content, including numbers and dates, to strings before passing them to the POI library. This means that its not possible to simply sum these values or do other calculations in excel.

I need this functionality and am working on a patch, but I wonder how to best expose this in a backward compatible way. My current code adds another attribute 'skipConversion' to the exporter which disables calling any converters. Formatting is then done by setting the correct cell styles through POI.

The current patch is here https://gist.github.com/1416519, comments are very welcome.

[sdguna]

Will this will be included in the future releases. This is a very useful and necessary functions.