Re: ODF spreadsheets

[Muthiah Annamalai]

kensmith wrote:
> On Thursday 17 January 2008 12:39, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
>   
> > On 17/01/2008, Mats Hedlund <address@hidden> wrote:
> >     
> > > Is there any work being done for import/export to ODF spreadsheets?
> > >       
> > Not that am I aware of, but do you really need it? Can't you use CSV
> > format instead?
> >
> > Spreadsheets havea  lot of extra data that isn't easily representable
> > in Octave anyways (formulae, formatting, cells that are more than one
> > column or row wide....). If you just want the numbers, you should be
> > able to use CSV to both import and export.
> >     
>
> The formatting seems to me to be the one reason to do it.  Octave could 
> write spreadsheets that have the formatting set based on some logic 
> within the Octave program.
>
> Being into electronics, I have a few times had to manually adjust 
> columns and change the units based on the data I ended up with.  A 
> classic example would be deciding to use K ohms or not based on the 
> highest resistance in the column.
>  
>   
> > Or if you *really* want Octave to read ODF spreadsheets, well, it
> > wouldn't be difficult except that we might have to add gzip to
> > Octave's build dependencies.
> >     
>
> Or maybe not.  The ODF outputter could take the address of the zip 
> program as a parameter and check at run time that it is there.
>
>
>   
For anyone interested in doing this work, a good starting point would be 
look at
Gnumeric / Gnome-spreadsheet's OO.o export facilities, and rewrite the 
same into
an OCT file. This will also be license compatible.
-Muthu