Niklas Nebel wrote:
On 11/09/08 00:48, William S Fulton wrote:
The biggest area for change though is DDE links and I need some help
here before implementing them. Firstly, tabs within a cell are broken
in the current versions of Calc and the problems are closely related
to newline characters within cells. Excel deals with both tabs and
newlines in cells and as this is a working solution, I'd like to know
if there is anyone who can provide some information as to how it
works. Somehow it is doing the impossible, here is why...
The old idea was that a cell just isn't supposed to contain TAB characters.
I've arrived at a juncture. Firstly, does anyone have a good insight
into all this? Secondly, assuming the dde links are done using SYLK,
is it okay to change this in OOo to match?
Also for links to other applications? That's a bit dangerous. There
might be tools (DDE servers) in use somewhere providing text data that
works well with OOo, but SYLK that we can't import for some reason. If
we support SYLK now, and prefer SYLK over text data if both are
available, such a tool would stop working with OOo.
Okay good point if there is some sort of auto selection for which format
to use by the client (OOo user). Surely the client chooses a DDE format
though, so in your scenario above, control is exerted over which format
is used, so the problematic SYLK wouldn't be selected by the user.
That's what seems to happen when using MS Office, but apparently using
OLE rather than DDE. For example, if you paste link html or unformatted
text, you get exactly what you ask for. So really it seems adding an
additional DDE format, whatever it is, to fix the multiline corner cases
wouldn't have any backwards compatibility problems.
Supporting robust DDE linking with other spreadsheet apps must be good
for OOo. Imagine a company transitioning from another spreadsheet
program to Calc. Maybe during the transition certain functionality has
not been rewritten for Calc or there is an addin that does not yet work
in Calc (eg xloper or VBA), then using DDE is a good stopgap solution to
getting functionality dynamically into Calc from another spreadsheet.
- Does anyone know of any other unix DDE clients, in particular
spreadsheets? If not the impact of changing the end of line terminator
from \n to \r\n won't be so big.
We don't do DDE on Unix. Links between OOo documents are handled within
OOo by SvLinkSource, SvBaseLink and related classes, but "external"
links are only implemented on Windows (svtools/source/svdde).
Okay very useful info, thanks.
William
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