Re: wishlist: file export feature

[Alex Barnes <alex barnes sympatico ca>]

On Fri, 2001-12-21 at 15:43, Dan Drake wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 21, 2001 at 03:03PM -0500, Alex Barnes wrote:
> > $ zcat myfile.gnumeric | some_xslt_tool >myfile.html
> >
> > All you'd need to do is parse the data under <gmr:Cells> using the xslt
> > tool and transform it into your html format.
>
> I think that's the problem. It's formulas that are stored in cells, and
> I want actual values ("24.6" instead of "=average(a1:a5)", etc). So you
> need a program that can interpret the formula and produce values --
> i.e., gnumeric itself.

OK, now I get it.  So, I suppose you could dump the data out of gnumeric
and then recalculate everything in perl, but then what would be the
point of having it in gnumeric in the first place?

> Of course, gnumeric does this every time you load a file: chew through
> the xml, figure out what data go in what cells, then calculate the
> spreadsheet. If the code is sufficiently modular, you could hook the
> spreadsheet engine to the html file exporter and bypass all the
> graphical display stuff.

Or maybe have a very generic gnumeric utility to take a file with
formulae and output the same file, but with the formulae calculations as
values.  You could then take this file and use xslt to get whatever
output format you want.

> I don't code, though, so I can't implement this idea, and I don't
> entirely understand xslt, so I might be totally missing the point
> here... :)

Yeah, it really seems like there should be a whole slate of file format
conversion tools that can be used on the command line: gnumeric2html,
gnumeric2csv, gnumeric2xls, etc.  Maybe this is something to look into
post-1.0?

 -Alex

> Dan
>
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