Dear sirs:
From Canada:
1) Bravo to India for standing up to those who would seek to
economically jeopardise its sovereighty!
2) I do a lot with Spreadsheets, and import and export are no surprise.
My experience tells me that no matter what kind of file one has, the
degree of internal structural complexity and what amounts to internal
executable code, is closely related to the difficuklties to be found it
importing and exporting.
For this reason, before I start a spreadsheet, I have my own
LibreOffice templates that I use for various situations.
These are set in Canadian or American English for the most part
(although some parts may be set for French or Spanish.
Transverbalisations:
I also use an .ODS spreadsheet for anothrer application:
Transverbalisations. This is somewhat like a text-searchable, highly
correlative Multi-lingual Thesaurus. I developed it out of the one time
need to translate a number of French expressions into English in the
training I was receiveing in a basic sales training.
The training epoisode was short-lived, but the application lived on
independently, and since has been somewhat enhanced to support Spanish.
However the application can also be enhanced to support many other
languages, but for that I would need the close collaboration of others
who can speak, read and write these other languages.
As far as I kknow, the some 18 Languages aside from Englsih that are
spoken in India are written left to right. However for those languages
(usually descended from the ancient Arameic in the middle east, as well
as half of Urdu) there is an assed bit of code that is intended to be
added to Libre Office to deal with the right to left concern in text
documents, frames etc.
Having not actually used this myself, I would have to defer anything
that nature to one who speaks one of those languages.
Some of the issues to be found in importing spreadsheets:
Hyperlinks may not always import without the need for cleanup. This
will depend somewhat on the type of hyperlink. Also hyperlinks that
target outside the file level may cause problems if their targets are
no longer in the same path as they originally were, notwithstanding the
spreadsheet type itself. This is particularly true if the target is
somewhere within the user's own system or within the LAN side of a
network. In the latter case, it will accue ongoing to the systems
administrator to maintain the stability of the LAN so as not to
engender unnecessary problems of this type.
Hyperlinks that access the internet are less likely to cause problems,
as long as their ultimate targets are not changed on the outside, and
there is no firewall rule that will interfere.
These are a few bits of information that may add to your insight as to
the huge migration the Indian Government is seeking to do, albeit out
of very serious necessity!
Best Regards,
Bruce Martin