Re: short minute of meeting at guadec

[Alan Horkan <horkana tcd ie>]

On Mon, 8 Apr 2002, Martin Sevior wrote:

> Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2002 22:19:08 +1000 (EST)
> From: Martin Sevior <msevior mccubbin ph unimelb edu au>
> To: Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>
> Cc: Rui Miguel Silva Seabra <rms 1407 org>, gnome-office-list gnome org
> Subject: Re: short minute of meeting at guadec
>
> Hi Folks,
> 	I've just committed a plugin for abiword called "AbiCommand" with
> it you can do things like edit a document, load, save and print from a
> command line or via an eternal program using fs = popen("abiword --plugin
> AbiCommand") and pipe commands in. It is also possible to write a CORBA
> interface to this but it is not obvious why that would make things easier.
>

#
> printing. (Pull data from gnome-gb or gumeric and use it replace defined
> text in an abiword document.

A lot of Abiword user would really love to be able to do a mail merge.

In my personal experience i use speadsheets for simple sorting, and
search and replace and i suspect this is what most people unfamiliar with
scripting languages do.
I also use a speadsheet as a simple flatform database, sometimes using
multiple (linked) sheets instead of seperate database tables.  I'll bet
this has been discussed by the Gnumeric people before, so if there is not
already one i think i should volunteer to write a tutorial to users
suggesting how to do this and why they probably dont really need a real/ms
proprietary database.


> Anyway with in place it seems to me we should start on putting together
> "Gnome Office Works." To things like form letter generation and envolope

I have bad associations with the word "Works" as the one from Microsoft is
a crippled office suite that barely "Works", when i first encountered it i
balked when i realised it could not even share its data base format with
access.

But i understand that is not what martin is really getting at, and the
general idea is sound, just i think going any where near the word "Works"
is marketing suicide.  Microsoft Works is an oxymoron.


Sincerely
Alan