[tdf-discuss] Macro Difficulties

This is a story about the usability of LO BASIC and the documentation thereof. And also a plea for 
help.

I'm trying to get LibreOffice to work with SAP Business One (hereafter called B1) in order to 
eliminate the need to pay for expensive licenses for Microsoft Excel.

B1 has a toolbar button that's supposed to generate a spreadsheet for data viewed as a table 
onscreen. Unfortunately, instead of really creating a spreadsheet, B1 just dumps out a 
tab-separated text file and then opens a spreadsheet called "AutoOpen.xls" that in turn loads the 
text file into a new spreadsheet.

This clunky way of doing things has the advantage that there's no worry about file formats. 
Whatever version of Excel you're running, it can open the text file. This method *could* work in 
LibreOffice too, but unfortunately the macro command used in AutoOpen.xls doesn't exist in LO 
BASIC. The command is Workbooks.OpenText

I'm not sure if the problem is that OpenText doesn't exist, or if there is no Workbooks object to 
begin with. The documentation on LO BASIC is so sparse that I can't find anything about opening 
spreadsheets. The LO help file promises documentation at OpenOffice.org; but clicking that link 
takes me instead to https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/BASIC_Guide, which is a 
placeholder page containing only a link to another website--which doesn't respond.

(By the way, the help file does document an Open command, but that command is used to open simple 
data files to be processed and closed by the script. It doesn't cause LO to open a document in the 
UI.)

After finding nothing documented, I enabled macro recording, began recording a macro, and used File 
> Open to open the text file/spreadsheet myself. Obviously, I was hoping to then examine the macro 
to learn what objects and functions LO uses to open files. But opening a new file causes macro 
recording to end without a comment, warning, or error…and without saving anything of the macro in 
progress.

Can anyone give me clues to creating a macro which can open a spreadsheet?  

--

Charles


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