Create Numbers file and open it with Numbers on iPad

Question

I would like to do a task that is quite simple on other OS, but it is not so trivial on iOS. Namely, I want to create file and open it in Numbers. I can preview the file with UIDocumentInteractionController and then offer it to user that he/she opens it. THis seems to me quite a reasonable solution. However, I need to offer proper file format. I suppose CSV and XLS would be reasonable to implement and it would most probably work, but I would still like to do it in native Numbers format if possible. However, I can't find any info about this file format.

Basically, this task is about exporting data to another app and then working further with them.

Answer 1

I don't know of a library that can create native Numbers files. There are hoewever some libraries that allow creating XLS files. Since Numbers fully supports XLS, this is probably the way to go.

There is a comercial library available that might work on the iPhone (costs $200): http://www.libxl.com/

As for free XLS libraries, I only know xlwt, a Python module. You could set up a webservice that creates an XLS file for your app, using xlwt on the server side.