Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 14:08:24 +0200 (EET)
From: Achilleus Mantzios <achill@matrix.gatewaynet.com>
To: Andrew Sullivan <ajs@crankycanuck.ca>
Cc: psql <pgsql-sql@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Import from Ms Excel
In-Reply-To: <20040316114716.GA4503@phlogiston.dyndns.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0403161401370.1464-100000@matrix.gatewaynet.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

O kyrios Andrew Sullivan egrapse stis Mar 16, 2004 :

> On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 01:42:45PM +0200, Achilleus Mantzios wrote:
> > Another fancy lib (although not necessarilly pgsql specific),
> > is the POI project from jakarta.
> > You can read/write M$ XLS documents from java, and 
> > subsequently (via jdbc) manipulate pgsql tables.
> > 
> > The good part is that you can dynamically generate an excel file
> > with arbitary content.
> 
> You can do the same thing (I have done it) with Perl using the Pg and
> WriteExcel modules.  Excel has a lot of pretty annoying limitations,
> though, and it's fairly dangerous to get too dependent on it for this
> sort of thing, as you can easily run into its limitations.

Especially the way "excel" tries to store date/time "cells" (in a way 
much like cobol in MVS mainframes),
or text not being able to contain only numeric chars, etc...

>  I suppose
> it depends on how big your resulting spreadsheets are going to be. 
> In my experience, though, the first thing that happens when you
> deliver someone a summary spreadsheet is, they ask you for the raw
> data so they can double-check it.

At least they dont have to worry about their latest antivirus update!

> 
> A
> 
> 

-- 
-Achilleus