Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi

HOWTO create in UNIX a Microsoft Excel sheet (with data from Oracle). At the moment I am making CSV files (using SQL statemens with || ';'), but search for more advanced formatting. Don't wish to use Perl.

cheers

Set aside that there are several "Excel formats", as the thing chanes its output with every (sub-)release: the native Excel format is not standardized at all and many aspects of it are undisclosed information by Microsoft, so all the information about its format out there in the net are mostly the fruit of (more or less accurate) reverse engineering.

It is doubtful that there is any gain in converting the output to Excel format with any other tool than Excel itself - just feed it a CSV-file and hope for the best (as you should anyways, using M$$-Office).

If you still want to undergo the exertion, you might want to read this document:

http://sc.openoffice.org/excelfileformat.pdf

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Excel can understand CSV quite well. Just make sure you import it with autodetection turned off, so that any data field that just might, possibly, squinting through a telescope on a dark night from 3 miles away, might just have the slightest resemblance to a date field doesn't get mangled into uselessness. In other words, the same problem Excel users face every day when trying to type in information. Don't you love excel?

Hi Corona

There are free utilityies we found called dump_txt and dump_csv, which will, at least, simplify your building csv files for input to excel.

These are Oracle functions, and a google search should find them.

As a variation, I created a dump_xls - which actually builds a dump in xml output, suitable for automated input into xls in their 2003 version or above. It has the advantage of producing multiple worksheets in a single xls file (something you cannot do with csv)

You might try starting with the dump_csv and reverse engineer an excel spreadsheet saving it in xml output form.

No perl needed at all.

I have and would use Perl. You can manipulate multiple sheets, format headings and columns and basically do anything that you could do if creating the spreadsheet in Excel itself.