Clarion with Libre Office

questions
1

I long ago did some testing with a subset of a our main Clarion program & Excel using Capesoft Office Inside. However, before committing to Excel and its very real problems in the long-term, I thought I’d give some consideration to Libre Office.

Might anyone have had some success in feeding a few, simple, query parameters from a Clarion app to an open source spreadsheet like Libre?

Douglas

2

I haven’t, but I did play at one point pulling apart the .ods file. It’s just a zip with some files, the main one being xml. You could get/put data directly I suspect.
Ingasoft also have a template for openoffice

3

Yes, we have template EasyOpenOffice, you can try it at this link

Guennadi

1 Like
4

Guennadi,

Thank you for the reminder about EasyOpenOffice. I will have to see how our users react to a possible change away from Excel.

5

I used Open/Libre Office for many years inhouse and tried to convince many of my customers to switch from exel to save some money.

My customers didn’t like OO/LO but could really explain why, other than “It’s just not the same”. In the end I gave up and took the path of least resistance - MS Office.

I’d be interested to hear if your experience is similar.

6

David,

I certainly agree that giving up MS Office would be a steep uphill battle.

From our developer perspective, I might cynically agree with “it’s just not the same” by pointing out how OO/LO does not suddenly crash like Excel, does not suddenly lose critical cell formatting parameters, does not yield calculation errors by confusing workbook cells in different files, doe not etc… However, having not yet fully evaluated OO/LO, I will try to withhold judgement for now.

7

:slight_smile: Someone as cynical as me :smiley: .

After over 30 years in the I.T. business trying to supply and support non-MS applications which were much cheaper and in my opinion more suited to requirements, I found that; If a MS product crashes/fails etc the customer accepts this as being normal. If it’s a non MS product then it’s the end of civilisation as we know it.

I know there are better and more cost effective solutions than MS but it’s an uphill battle trying to convince a customer.

ps. After all thats why I’ve been developing in Clarion since V2 DOS.