[ic] Spreadsheet-advice (OFF-TOPIC)

Mike Heins mikeh@minivend.com
Mon, 16 Oct 2000 13:54:28 -0400


Quoting draftd (draftd@hotmail.com):
> Short question:
> I need some spreadsheet program compatible with interchange to edit the
> products.txt file.
> 
> Micro$oft excell works, but it's quiet anoying to swich between 2 operating
> systems on my home computer. (Redhat 7.0). I can't get any of Gnumeric's data
> formats compatible with IC.

Gnumeric works great. You can use the simple-text format -- in fact
there is a hidden page in the UI, admin/dbdownload.html, which will
produce a Gnumeric worksheet of all of the databases. (There will be
some occasional parse errors, but they are pretty few and should show
up as errors if you run "gnumeric &" from a command line shell.)

If you save a single worksheet in Simple text, and then just remove the
first line that contains the worksheet name, you have a perfectly fine
TAB-delimited file. I think the regular text export works good, too,
if set up right.

And I had been planning on writing the companion page that will accept
an upload of all, but I hadn't gotten to it yet. The main reason is
that Gnumeric prior to 0.54 didn't write the spreadsheet properly in 
simple text format. I submitted a patch to gnumeric that fixed that,
and I think it made it into 0.56, so I will do that soon.

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