In general, you will tend to run into problems when you make use of proprietary
file formats. You will find that things like zip file formats and various image
file formats are well supported in Squeak, because they tend to work the same
way on any computer or operating system. However, a native Excel workbook format
will not be supported, because it tends to be associated with a specific software
vendor and it cannot be relied upon to work the same (or at all) on a platform
that does not support the Excel spreadsheet program.

So to take the example of an Excel file, you would have no trouble opening it
and reading it into Squeak (in the sense that you could read the raw data from
the file), but you would not be able to open it as a spreadsheet object in the
Squeak environment. At least not easily, anything seems to be possible with
Squeak in one way or another.

In some ways, Squeak likes to think of itself as a world apart, in the sense
that it works exactly the same way bit for bit and pixel for pixel on any
computer, even if the computer does not even have its own operating system.
In this respect, it is probably the most portable computing environment you
will find anywhere, and an application that you write in Squeak will work pretty
much the same on a handheld computer or a large multiuser server, with no
recompiling needed. On the other hand, if you want to use Squeak as sort of
a glue for scripting or manipulating vendor-specific things, this is a little
harder and you may find that other Smalltalks will make the task easier.

Dave

On Sat, Dec 27, 2003 at 05:51:18PM +0000, Tony Balazs wrote:
> 
> Hi Gary,
> Thank you so much for your quick response.  This is the answer I hoped for!
> Without asking you to go into details, if, say, I wanted to reference a Word or Excel
> file in my application (e.g. clicking on a button opens a file chosen from a dropdown
> menu) would there be ways of doing this cross-platform?  I guess in this case the
> application would need to know which platform it was running on....
> Tony.
> Gary Fisher wrote:
>    
> > Hi, Tony!
> > 
> > It's trivial perhaps, but very significant: Squeak is profoundly 
> > cross-platform, the beauty of the Virtual Machine concept.  Your application 
> > will neither know nor care whether it's running on a Mac, a PC, or any of the 
> > many other Squeak platforms.
> > 
> > Happy Squeaking!
> > 
> > Gary
> > 
> > On Saturday 27 December 2003 08:00, Tony Balazs wrote:
> >   
> > 
> > > Hi everyone and Happy Holidays.
> > > 
> > > I am new to Squeak and almost new to Smalltalk.  A quick question:
> > > 
> > > I am about to start a new project using Squeak for Windows.  I need to
> > > know the following (hopefully trivial): once it's ready for
> > > distribution, will producing a version of the software to run on Apple
> > > Macintoshes be quite easy?  Can I do that from Windows or would it need
> > > to be done on a Mac?
> > > 
> > > Thanks,
> > > Tony.