opening and amending an excel spreadsheet from filePro

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010, Kenneth Brody wrote:
>On 4/22/2010 10:52 AM, Dennis Malen wrote:
>> We have the need to modify an excel spreadsheet received by third parties.
>> Within the spreadsheet received from the third party is enough information
>> to search for a filePro record. What we would like to do is to create
>> processing that seamlessly opens the excel spreadsheet, looks up the record
>> in filePro and then places the appropriate information in a specific column
>> and line and closes the file ready to return to the third party.
>>
>> What we do now is create tab delimited file from the excel spreadsheet,
>> import that into a filepro file, do the lookups and then export the
>> information in a .csv file and return to the third party.
>
>So you basically want filePro to update the spreadsheet in-place?  Here is 
>the XLS file format specification:

Rather than reinventing wheels and attempting to understand
Microsoft documentation, I would try using tools already done for
this.  Here's a page that has links to severaly python modules
for reading and writing excel files.  I'm sure there are perl
packages available from CPAN that do similar things.

	http://www.python-excel.org/

On the other hand, I use the OpenOffice-calc program for spread
sheets, and have read/write access to postgresql and mysql
databases directly from any OpenOffice.org application.

The OpenOffice.org packages have JDBC and ODBC access to many back
end databases.  The only ones I've used are postgresql and mysql.

Bill
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