[ILUG] Table in Linux into .doc format

[Chris Higgins]

On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 12:42:39 +0100
Timothy Murphy <tim at birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie> wrote:

> On Sunday 10 October 2004 23:25, Gareth Eason wrote:
> 
> >  Perhaps a quick chat with the system designers asking them for a
> > specification of required input format, rather than just a sample,
> > might yield some useful answers and make your workload a lot
> > simpler. 
> 
> I contacted the company in question,
> and they said they want an Excel file,
> and only gave a Word doc as an example
> because they thought people would find it easier to read.
> 
> Incidentally, the "project" is to send insurance forms for a school
> with each pupil listed (with date of birth, etc).
> 
> I'd love a little Java screen to put in the data.
> Does anyone know of such a thing?

Whadda ya need ? Nice GUI for you or someone else ? 
Whaddabout a little shell script that calls 'dialog'

while(result is not 'done' then )
 dialog --extra-button --extra-label "Done - Exit" --form "Enter User Details" 20 80 20 "Name:" 1 1 "name here" 1 10 30 30 "Birth:" 2 1 "birthday here d/m/y" 2 10 30 30 "Sex:" 3 1 "M/F" 3 10 1 1 >> user.input

then 
cat user.input | awk/perl/sed to process it nicely >> my.csv file

Add some smarts to the while loop and you can do data validation at each stage, and the
dialog UI is customisable so you can hide the back end completely amd make it easy
for anyone to use... 

With all the usual caveats about this not being finished code ( and wanting to insert tests for the
dialog tool return values etc, and not allowing root to run this as it's not the most secure way
of handling tmp files :-)

> 
> Surely it would be more interesting (and useful)
> than all these sed scripts ...

That's asking for trouble... I'd just advise at this stage that you
drop that line of interrogation or I'll have to wander around with
a bit of 4x2 to 're-educate' you :-)

> 
> 
> -- 
> 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