Re: Your automagic screenshots!

[Ben Pfaff]

I followed the saga of standardizing the XLSX format in some detail
when it was going on 10 or so years ago. At least at the time, it was
said that it would take a lot of work for a program to read it,
because (for example) a program that read it would need to be able to
implement recalculation, including all the formulas and functions,
since the files didn't necessarily include the pre calculated values.
This suggests to me that, if PSPP were to be able to read these files
directly, then we would need to use a third-party library or program
to do it with a reasonable amount of code.

Maybe we should add instructions for conversion to the FAQ or the
manual. The batch mode instructions look helpful to me.

On Tue, Mar 22, 2022 at 11:41 AM Alan Mead <amead2@alanmead.org> wrote:
>
> You are probably aware, but the XLSX format used in recent versions of
> Excel is significantly more accessible (it's a ZIP file containing XML
> and similar data) than the older XLS format.
>
> Also, it's fairly easy to open an XLS/XLSX file in LibreOffice and save
> it as CSV, but you can also use LO in a batch mode (Windows/DOS example):
>
> "C:\Program Files\LibreOffice\program\scalc.exe" --convert-to csv
> "excel_file.xls"
>
> produces "excel_file.csv" in CSV format.
>
> -Alan
>
> On 3/22/2022 1:29 PM, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> > It's an extraordinarily common feature request, so if there's a
> > practical way to support direct import then we should consider it.
> >
> > On Tue, Mar 22, 2022 at 11:26 AM John Darrington
> > <john@darrington.wattle.id.au> wrote:
> >> So far as I'm aware, there's no way of importing directly from excel.  You 
> >> would
> >> first have to convert the excel file to something else like gnumeric or 
> >> opendocument
> >> format.
> >>
> >> J'
> >>
> >> On Tue, Mar 22, 2022 at 10:45:32AM +0100, Friedrich Beckmann wrote:
> >>       Hi John,
> >>
> >>       i just had a look at your automagic screenshots that you take for 
> >> the documentation. Very nice. This Nina who asked on the mailing list
> >>
> >>       https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/pspp-users/2022-03/msg00031.html 
> >> <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/pspp-users/2022-03/msg00031.html>
> >>
> >>       how to import from Excel mentioned that it would be nice to have a 
> >> description for this in the manual. I wanted to propose her that she could
> >>       make such a manual which would currently mean to write the texi code 
> >> which would require to have a build system running to see the rendered 
> >> pages. Automagic screenshots would be even more advanced.
> >>
> >>       Did you ever propose users just to make some kind of handcrafted 
> >> tutorial or documentation, provide it in pdf under some CC license and we 
> >> would publish it on the gnu website?
> >>
> >>       Cheers
> >>
> >>       Fritz
> >>
> >>
>