Lazarus 1.0.12 FPC 2.6.2
Please bear with me, I'm a comparative beginner at Lazarus and fpSpreadsheet is the first add-on I've attempted to add on. Firstly I did not know that the zip download at SourceForge was an unwise choice, secondly it took me an age to work out how to install it into Lazarus and I'm still not convinced I managed it properly, third there were several failed attempts to open a small Excel 2003 .xls file, fourth an attempt to run the write demo produced a message that some required component could not be found...
So I came looking in this Forum and found this thread which suggests that a more advanced package has to be downloaded from this mysterious SVN thing (it may mean something to you guys, but absolutely nothing to me). I eventually downloaded TortoiseSVN but have to say the Help is over my head. I tried "svn checkout svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/lazarus-ccr/svn/components/fpspreadsheet fpspreadsheet" at the command prompt as recommended by the wiki at the URL in a message below, and after a while... nothing happened. But then I don't know what was supposed to happen. Nothing seems to be any different, I get the same message from excel5write.dpr that fpsconvencoding cannot be found.
Please, where do I start to sort all this out ? Do I have to uninstall something, and if so what and how? Where can I find help for beginners with no knowledge of or even interest in the internal workings of the Lazarus IDE, that covers all this ? I used to use XLSMini in Delphi 7 and never had any problem with that. All I want to do is read plain text from the cells of simple Excel worksheets, nothing complicated. Looks like it might be quicker to just export as a csv file from Excel, I've probably spent more time today trying to install fpSpreadsheet than it can possibly save me through not having to do work with csv files.
Many thanks
Caravelle