Spreadsheet options

[omni]

have you used anything (less expensive or free) than Excel for spreadsheets. We have clients with over 100 users utilizing terminal servers and they are updating to the newest windows server. Apparently some new requirement includes individual licenses and must use office 365, so 100+ licenses, Ouch.
We only export entire files (work files normally, mapped out) to xls. Some we do to csv on nightly runs, which is not relevant to the issue as they are emailed. All export options eventually call one export write out to xls based on dbf file name and saved file name,
then open for the user,probably 100 of these in our app.

Actually, specifically Libreoffice is what they want to use.

Thanks

Fred
Omni

[skiman]

Hi,

Maybe you can have one application on the server which processes the data and creates the XLS? In this case you only need to have one Excel licence.

You could do this with a soap server or rest-api.
- Prepare the data as csv and put this on the server.
- Send a request to convert the csv to xls on the server.
- After processing the file you have the xls.
- Then you can open it with the application you want.

[k-insis]

Libreoffice will absolutely open such files. Compatiblity is kinda ok-ish as long it is more basic spreadsheet but you might run into issues with files that do a lot of advanced formulas and macros - forget them.

libreoffice has also options to run as "service" and do various conversions/operations for you (it can produce decent pdf files). Same goes with command line call to main libreoffice exe

there are also various python libraries that work with excel files

you can even write simple rest web service that accepts csv and then uses it to convert to xlsx files via https://xlsxwriter.readthedocs.io/

So if you only need libreoffice to show file and nothing less, you are good to go.

have you used anything (less expensive or free) than Excel for spreadsheets. We have clients with over 100 users utilizing terminal servers and they are updating to the newest windows server. Apparently some new requirement includes individual licenses and must use office 365, so 100+ licenses, Ouch.
We only export entire files (work files normally, mapped out) to xls. Some we do to csv on nightly runs, which is not relevant to the issue as they are emailed. All export options eventually call one export write out to xls based on dbf file name and saved file name,
then open for the user,probably 100 of these in our app.

Actually, specifically Libreoffice is what they want to use.

Thanks

Fred
Omni

[Tom]

A guy from the german Xbase-forum created a library to generate XLS/XLSX files very fast from Xbase++-applications without having Excel installed. https://www.xbaseforum.de/viewtopic.php?t=7610