I just discovered Roo on RubyForge. Looking at the documentation it looks like a FasterCSV alternative.
This gem allows you to access the content of
- Open-office spreadsheets (.ods)
- Excel spreadsheets (.xls)
- Google (online) spreadsheets
I can not see it replacing FasterCSV at the moment, as a lot of the features presented are available through FasterCSV.
In my mind, the only thing separating this from FasterCSV is the ability to save your spreadsheets to Google Docs. This is cool because one could share a spreadsheet with a customer, and write generated reports to it for automated reporting.
I happen to store all my hours worked in a Google document, so this would be great for generating excel reports by month to give to my employer.