Re: [Evolution] Exporting to open office?

[Bill Barnard <bill barnard-engineering com>]

On Mon, 2003-01-06 at 14:26, Carl Parrish wrote:
> Is there any way to export my contact list into Open Office?

I've been working on this very problem with partial success. My approach
was to try to use OpenLDAP as the bridge between Evo and Open Office.

However Open Office has access to only some of the fields stored in LDAP
because it has an interface that only understands the Mozilla address
book, and cannot do an arbitrary mapping between the Open Office address
fields and the LDAP fields. It can do an arbitrary mapping between the
OOo fields and the Mozilla fields.

I'm currently working on a simple parser that will read a .ldif file I
export from LDAP into a simple, probably tab-delimited, spreadsheet
format that can be registered with OOo as a data source. This is a
relatively easy job, except that addresses are stored in fields like the
evolutionperson.schema field homePostalAddress and the individual pieces
like City, State, etc. are not stored discretely. When I get the .ldif
file using ldapsearch I must base64-decode these entries (easy enough),
but then I cannot easily parse the address field for the pieces since
they are not uniquely delimited.

Another possible approach would be to use the
evolution-addressbook-export command line utility to produce a Vcard
file containing all the local addressbook entries in Vcard format.
That's nice, but still has the individual address field parsing problem.

If you're willing to simply use a mailing address as a single piece
instead of breaking it into address/City/State/etc fields then either
the LDAP or Vcard solution can be made to work quite easily.

When I have a "complete" solution I intend to document it, but it's not
yet done.

Cheers,

Bill
-- 
Bill Barnard <bill barnard-engineering com>