OpenOffice.org's (OOo's) UNO bridge is a way to transfer data between OOo and other progs. Getting an Octave-OOo bridge through UNO was on my wishlist for a long time. As a first step I've just completed spreadsheet reading support based on a Java/UNO bridge and committed it to octave-forge svn (io package). Writing support (and updated docs) will follow later.
OpenOffice.org and clones (like LibreOffice) have the advantages of being cross-platform (= not confined to MS-Windows + MS-Office). Additionally they can process many spreadsheet formats for reading and writing, e.g., .ods (Open Document Spreadsheet), .sxc (old StarOffice and OpenOffice 1.x), .xls (both BIFF5/Excel 95 and BIFF8/ Excel 97+), .xlsx (OOXML, or Excel 2007), .wk1 (??) ...., in fact all formats you can see in the file save dialog of OpenOffice (+ some more for just reading). As it stands for now the UNO bridge works only through an odsopen - ods2oct - odsclose sequence (and of course, odsread); both ODS and Excel files can be read if the 'UNO' interface is requested. odsfinfo() (for exploring spreadsheet files) works too with UNO. I'll add the UNO stuff to the Excel scripts as well, in a later stage; in fact I'd like to integrate all spreadsheet I/O stuff, for all supported spreadsheet formats, in just a few user scripts that serve as "front end" (and keep xlsread / xlswrite etc. for ML compatibility). Needed is the Java-1.2.8 package (not yet released, so grab it from svn) with the very latest patches applied (esp. java.lang.Short support, committed May 4, 2011), and the svn version of the io package. There's a new support file in the io package, called chk_spreadsheet_support.m, which can set up all needed javaclasspath entries. As (3rd) input it needs the fully qualified path to the OOo installation directory. I'm looking for a way to sort that out automatically - can anyone hint me? You may want/need to increase the JVM memory using a java.opts file (see docs in io package). Why am I writing this? because I need testers. I've only tried on Windows; on Linux I could only test the basic low level stuff due to lack of time. I'll be away for a week; hopefully in the mean time some of you would like to try it out and report bugs, failures, etc. to me. TIA, Philip ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd _______________________________________________ Octave-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/octave-dev
