Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of dwcronin
dwcroninFlag for United States of America

asked on

format an ods document

I use ubuntu 13.04 if that's important.
 
I have an ordered by author list of my kindle books.  I saved the file as csv and ods. I used vim and looked at the 2 files.  I can read and understand the csv.  The ods is unreadable because of the formatting characters I guess.  I did this so I could write a program to switch between:
1) white text on a black background
2) black text on a white background
when the author changed.  I was hoping to write a program that reads the csv file and writes the ods file.  Is this method in the ballpark or should I try to write a macro in libreoffice calc?    Or something entirely different?  I include the csv file just for completeness.
listofbooks.csv
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of FishMonger
FishMonger
Flag of United States of America image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Avatar of dwcronin

ASKER

You mentioned Excel.  I'm  using Ubuntu with libreoffice calc.  I'm happy to learn Perl code but I don't want to put 7 back on my system.  Is any of this related to LO calc?
Don't let the "Excel" portion of the module name scare you off.

The module creates a cross platform spreadsheet which can be read by OpenOffice or Excel on either Windows or Linux systems.

I have one script that was written and tested on Windows and then moved to a Linux (Fedora) server when put into production.
Taken from the module's documentation.

The Spreadsheet::WriteExcel Perl module can be used to create a cross-platform Excel binary file. Multiple worksheets can be added to a workbook and formatting can be applied to cells. Text, numbers, formulas, hyperlinks, images and charts can be written to the cells.

The file produced by this module is compatible with Excel 97, 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2007.

The module will work on the majority of Windows, UNIX and Mac platforms. Generated files are also compatible with the Linux/UNIX spreadsheet applications Gnumeric and OpenOffice.org.
The ods is unreadable because of the formatting characters I guess.  
It's unreadable as it's a compressed binary file

You could use the Uno api to do this
http://api.libreoffice.org/
In future, dwcronin, if you're going to post in a TA, please don't ignore the comments made in that TA
CEHJ:  I apologize for doing that.  In all honesty, what did I do wrong.  I don't know what a TA is.
Well you deliberately included the question in the Java topic area (TA) and then ignored the answer from that area
CEHJ: I'm sorry but someone in the Perl TA had already answered my question.  I cannot tell which TA expert will be able to answer my question first but I do know the TA areas that are relevant to my question and I stand any chance of understanding.  I put  lots of effort into trying to understand your answers and I regret if while I  am trying to understand one person's answer that you are still working on the question.  The only way that I could fix this would be if I only placed my question in one TA.  Then I question why you give me 3 TAs that I can put my question into.  EE also requests that I respond quickly to your answers.  I try to assign points as soon as I read an answer I like and again, I'm sorry if you're still working on it.
I'm sorry if you're still working on it.
If you're saying that you didn't see my answer then that's a little different. I would suggest though that you try to have a final read through of the answers posted before you close the question
Thanks.  I closed the question yesterday or the day before.  I will definitely go back and read/try the other solutions.  I was very excited to see the Perl solution.  I thought that my desire to write ods files was impossible.