Default Formatting
Default formatting is applied to all empty cells (those not described
by a cell record). Firstly row default information (ROW record,
Rowinfo class) is used if available. Failing that, column default
information (COLINFO record, Colinfo class) is used if available. As a
last resort the worksheet/workbook default cell format will be used;
this should always be present in an Excel file, described by the XF
record with the fixed index 15 (0-based). By default, it uses the
worksheet/workbook default cell style, described by the very first XF
record (index 0). Formatting features not included in xlrd version
0.6.1
Rich text i.e. strings containing partial bold italic and underlined
text, change of font inside a string, etc. See OOo docs s3.4 and s3.2
Asian phonetic text (known as "ruby"), used for Japanese furigana. See
OOo docs s3.4.2 (p15) Conditional formatting. See OOo docs s5.12,
s6.21 (CONDFMT record), s6.16 (CF record) Miscellaneous sheet-level
and book-level items e.g. printing layout, screen panes. Modern Excel
file versions don't keep most of the built-in "number formats" in the
file; Excel loads formats according to the user's locale. Currently
xlrd's emulation of this is limited to a hard-wired table that applies
to the US English locale. This may mean that currency symbols, date
order, thousands separator, decimals separator, etc are inappropriate.
Note that this does not affect users who are copying XLS files, only
those who are visually rendering cells.