Re: [Sheflug] Can open office help?

[Lesley Binks <lesley.binks@xxxxxxxxx>]

Alex Hudson wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-02-01 at 07:29 +0000, david wrote:
>> When the data is exported Excel's now fired up automatically and the
>> data appears in a spreadsheet. .... The network manager's looked
>> for a temporary excel file on the hard drive but can't find one, and
>> the error that comes up on the machines with Office 2000 is something
>> like 'The application couldn't be found' - sorry I didn't jot down the
>> exact message. Can anyone suggest a way in which OO (or another open
>> source solution) might help? 
> 
> Well, if there's no temporary file, something very odd is going on. It
> could be Excel is sourcing the information directly from SIMS - which
> would be interesting - or that SIMS is essentially pasting the
> information into Excel.
> 
> I think you need to try harder to find where the data is coming from :)
> 
> The "worst case scenario" is that SIMS actually loads up the Excel
> application, and pushes the data into it: it sounds like a lot of effort
> and I don't see why they would have done that, but it's possible.
> 
They might have done it as a way of ensuring people upgrade regularly.

> Possibly, they're using some different system than files. It could be a
> web query - search the hard drive for *.iqy files - or they could be
> doing something with ODBC. 
ODBC is an interface between applications and database management
systems.  There was stuff for Access as well as MS-SQL etc but I don't
think I saw anything specific to Excel when I last worked with it.
> 
> I would try opening up the data in Excel again, and try to look in the
> Excel information dialogs to see where Excel thinks the data is coming
> from.
> 
> Obviously, if they're doing it via the Office APIs and pushing data into
> it, you're likely stuffed - you'd have to write an automatic Office
> macro or something to get the data out again
If it is being loaded into an Excel worksheet can that not be written
out to a csv file ? And then couldn't that be automated via a macro?
Long time since I used Excel.

If I'm understanding the data flow correctly it comes out of SIMS and
into Excel with a csv file written out along the way.  Lack of upgrade
appears to mean you've lost the csv part of that operation and that is
what's causing problems.

As Alex said there's probably a temporary file coming out somewhere but
it might not be a temporary Excel file so the extension may be
different.  Have a good look on that drive for files about the data and
time you expect the data to appear or have appeared.

The only way you can replace the whole thing with OO stuff is to ask for
the data to be output from SIMS in a format that Calc can pick up - Calc
being the OO equivalent of Excel.  csv being the universal answer.

Seems to me they are tying school's data in unless they pay more money.
 No open source equivalent to SIMS is there?

Regards

Lesley





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