Re: Import from Ms Excel

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