Re: How to ask a question?
Hi,
On Sun, Jul 27, 2025 at 10:09:05AM -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 27, 2025 at 07:33:36 -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
> > Now I have to relearn how to extract specific content from spreadsheets.
> > Something I haven't done in close to two decades.
>
> What I usually ended up doing was opening the spreadsheet in Libre Office,
> then saving it as a "CSV" (comma-separated values) file. I'm not aware
> of any way to do that purely from the command line.
CSV is always the go-to of course, but a lot of modern programming
languages can actually read (even write!) ODS and XLS files to some
extent as well.
I recently used a Rust crate¹ to programmatically read from a LibreCalc
spreadsheet (ODS) file.
It was nice because since everything in Rust is strongly typed, you
had to go to some effort to validate what you were reading (or treat it
as just text) but then you could be confident about what type of value
it was. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy this was and how well it
worked.
Not suggesting this particular thing for Richard who probably doesn't
know any Rust, just saying that it's worth keeping some basic
programming skills going — and mine really are basic.
Thanks,
Andy
¹ https://docs.rs/spreadsheet-ods/latest/spreadsheet_ods/
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