[ILUG] Table in Linux into .doc format

[Chris Higgins]

On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 17:36:38 +0100
Timothy Murphy <tim at birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie> wrote:

> I have to write a boringly long table with 4 items in each line
> (name, date of birth, etc).
> I then have to return the document in MS .doc format
> as far as I can see.
> (There is a model response which is in .doc format.)
> 
> I'd like to write this in Linux if possible.
> What is the simplest way of doing this?

Use the 'standard' file formats ( CSV, RTF ) 

> Could I produce a file in Linux which could be imported by Excel,
> and then output as a .doc file?

CSV ( Comma separated values ) will import nicely into any spreadsheet..
(or at least I haven't found one yet that won't take it as a file format )

a,b,c,d
1,,3,4
,,,3

will fill the columns nicely.. 

> 
> I'm not sure if OpenOffice works on my laptop.
> I just tried it, and I think it died.
> So if there is an alternative (gnumeric?) that might be better.

It will read/write .csv files 

> I'm running FC3-test2, which might explain why OO didn't work.

Anything of interest in the OO crash ?

I use debian - and an apt-cache search threw up a collection of things
that understand .csv files - some of which were 

cl-csv - Common Lisp utility to import CSV text files
gnumeric - A GNOME spreadsheet application
libdbd-csv-perl - perl DBD::CSV - DBI driver for CSV files
libtext-csv-perl - perl Text::CSV_XS - comma-separated values manipulation routines
libxml-csv-perl - Perl module for transforming CSV documents into XML
python2.2-csv - A fast CSV (comma-separated-value) class for python scripts
xml2 - Convert between XML, HTML, CSV and a line-oriented format

So if this is a longer term repeatable problem you may be able
to script most of the work using perl / python / lisp ... 

> 
> -- 
> Timothy Murphy  
> e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
> tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
> s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
> -- 
> Irish Linux Users' Group
> http://www.linux.ie/mailman/listinfo/ilug/
> 


-- 
Chris Higgins                              
Darach Technology Ltd                      tel: +353-1-6204370
email: chris.higgins at darach.ie          fax: +353-1-6204371
http://www.darach.ie