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Re: spreadsheet question



On Tue, Jul 10, 2007 at 06:34:58PM -0700, David Fox wrote:
> On 7/10/07, Jude DaShiell <jdashiel@shellworld.net> wrote:
> >
> >For the debian command line user, what spreadsheet package comes equipped
> >with the most functions?
> 
> 
> I'm not sure that "command line user" and "spreadsheet" should be uttered in
> the same sentence. :) Be that as it may, spreadsheets traditionally are
> graphical at least in how they are presented. There is/was a spreadsheet
> program that could be run in a non-graphical mode, called "sc" and it still
> may be available. I tinkered with it in my early days with Linux when there
> wasn't a lot of this sort of thing available. ISTR that with "sc" you could
> pipe things through it as well as operate it in a more "traditional"
> spreadsheet manner.
> 
> If you're a typical command line user, you might just have your data stored
> in flat ascii files, and as long as the data are stored that way, you can
> use the unix tools that are already there (awk, perl, "join" (for putting
> columns together) and so on) to do the calculations you require.

I also tried the CUI (curses-user-interface) spreadsheets but I found
that they required too much memory work (what key does what, etc).  I
found it much easier to just use postgresql with the psql CLI front-end.  

Postgresql comes with any function you can think of execpt perhaps
presentation.  The documentation is excellent and SQL queries
(data-entry and -retreival) are easy; I didn't do SQL looping and
branching.

Doug.



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