Generic spreadsheet interface

[Phil Hibbs]

I've currently got an Excel spreadsheet with loads of VBA, and I've
been thinking of porting it to OpenOffice.org. "This is a Python
list!" I hear you cry, but bear with me - rather than just re-writing
all the VBA code in OOo script, I thought, "why not make it generic -
so it can work with Excel or OOo?" - then I thought of Python. Python
can interface with both, but the specifics of how to interface with
each are very different. What would be nice is a generic wrapper class
that can work with either. Has anyone come across anything like that?

Phil Hibbs.

 

[Simon Hibbs]

Hi Bro, I don't know of anything like that. The spreadsheet sites I do
know of are application-specific.

http://www.python-excel.org/

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Python
http://lucasmanual.com/mywiki/OpenOffice

Note that the O bindings for Python are only for Python 2.3 which
is a little archaic, but it's the version I started with and should be
more than good enough for spreadsheet work. A port to 2.5 is well
underway.

You'd probably need to write your own application-specific wrapper
modules with a common API and then use those, but it's probably not as
much work as it sounds and could be developed incrementaly.
Alternatively you just write your code against one spreadsheet module,
and then write a wrapper module for the other spreadsheet API so it
looks the same.

Simon Hibbs