Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: MS Excel file macros cause infinite loop of errors

Hi :)
+1 
to all of Jay's various points there.  I totally agree.  

The "another private company", the one that sent the offending spreadsheet, appears to be Oracle.  
So, 
1.  it's extremely unlikely that they will re-write the macros for LibreOffice or even for 
OpenOffice (same macro languages)  
2.  that fact the macros seem horribly broken is not a surprise either and they probably wont fix 
them
3.  If we could fix them and send to the original poster so that he could send the results to the 
"another company"  in an ODF document then that would be a bit of a triumph for all of us.  

Yes, it would be nice if someone here got paid for the work but that is unlikely to happen.  
Ideally i would like someone here to get paid perhaps somewhat less than the cost of new MSO 
licenses for the op's machines.  Perhaps Andrew Pitonyak, Alex, Jay, Dan(?) or someone else that 
knows macro coding well enough to get it done quite quickly.  

At the moment the company that approached us doesn't have any versions of MSO (apart fromt he old 
2003 lurking somewhere) and it's only being forced into buying MSO by this 1 document from Oracle!! 
 It's outrageous that Oracle would do such a thing but again, no surprise!  So, even if no-one got 
paid it would still be a good result for us.  

Regards from
Tom :)  





> ________________________________
> From: Jay Lozier <jslozier@gmail.com>
> To: users@global.libreoffice.org 
> Sent: Tuesday, 12 February 2013, 14:21
> Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: MS Excel file macros cause infinite loop of errors
>
> On 02/12/2013 01:34 AM, e-letter wrote:
> > On 11/02/2013, todd.e.moore <todd.e.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Originally I posted under my todd.moore@dynamicsystemsinc.com
> > > account.Unfortunately, I need the macros enabled.  The spreadsheet is
> > > developed by another company and includes features/functions that we must
> > > use to properly submit requests.The behavior I observe is that after
> > > changing security settings to allow the macros to run, I receive a macro
> > > execution error that pops up on the screen.  Clicking on the equivalent of
> > > "ok", "ignore", "cancel" just displays another error message.  This
> > > continues for what seems about 30 clicks.  Then the boxes no longer appear.
> > >
> > > Trying to do anything in the UI, even closing the file, starts the error
> > > message deluge again.I noticed the issue in v3.x.x and hoped that with
> > > v4.0.0 there may have been changes that would cope with the macros in this
> > > file.  Unfortunately, the problems persist.Attaching file (1MB zip file
> > > containing a single MS Excel ) that causes this issue to occur.
> > > File_with_Bad_Macro.zip
> > > <http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/file/n4036499/File_with_Bad_Macro.zip>
> > Amazed that a private company receives a proprietary file from another
> > private company and asks the libre software community to solve a
> > proprietary problem.
> >
> > LO is not an m$ clone. A business that can't afford to pay m$
> > licences, most probably shouldn't be in business.
> >
> > How does odf benefit from LO being used to solve your problem?
> >
> > Have you contacted the source of the document and asked them to
> > re-format the document to ods?
> >
> > What did they say? ;)
> >
> > Have you contacted m$ and asked them to make their software easier to
> > use with non-m$ products? Did you get a reply ? ;)
> >
> > How much company time have you wasted, compared to the cost of buying
> > a legitimate copy of m$? Is your MD aware?
> e-letter
>
> The issue is macro conversion which is tricky at best. As budgets tighten many are looking for 
> less expensive or free options for software and these issues are important to address in a polite 
> manner not snide comments about the validity of their license or how they should use MSO. MS does 
> not by their choice have versions of MSO for all OSes so depending on your OS you may not even 
> have an option to use MSO.
>
> In previous post, it was noted that the macro may be buggy because it apparently does not always 
> run correctly in Excel (2003). So there may have two independent problems: a buggy macro and macro 
> conversion/interoperability.
>
> Macros are the hardest area to convert because of differences in the APIs between MSO and LO.
>
> -- Jay Lozier
> jslozier@gmail.com
>
>
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