Re: [libreoffice-users] MS Office ole automation

On 12/11/2013 06:56 AM, Milos Sramek wrote:
> Hi,
>
> a friend of mine has asked me for help. Their (small) company would 
> like to get rid of dependency on Microsoft tools. The situation is:
> They have a company information system, which every now and then 
> generates a spreadsheet table, which lands in MS Excel on some 
> computer. For this MS Office ole automation is used. He has asked me, 
> if it is somehow possible to redirect this to LibreOffice. Vendor if 
> the information system has refused to support something like that (a 
> small company fully dependent on MS).
>
> Is this somehow possible? Does anybody have experience with it?
>
> thanks
> Milos
Milos,

I have a few of questions:

What is the backend of the information system? There almost always is a 
database present. Maybe it could configured to save the data in another 
format - most likely csv/tsv. If you are very lucky it may support 
export to ods.

What Excel format are they using? If xls (most likely), directly 
importing into Calc maybe the easiest solution. If the xlsx, it will 
probably work but there are reports that xlsx files are more problematic.

How complex is the spreadsheet? If it is basically a data with at most a 
few formulas and no outside links or internal links between sheets then 
importing into Calc will be much less troublesome. I doubt this is true.

Are there any macros in the Excel spreadsheet? Though I doubt any are 
present, this would be one area that would make using Calc very difficult.

Thinking about your question, I would install LO and try opening several 
of the spreadsheets and see if problems occur. Calc does a very good job 
of opening MSO formats.

--
Jay Lozier
jslozier@gmail.com


--
To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscribe@global.libreoffice.org
Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted