Re: [libreoffice-users] MS Office ole automation

Hi,

The OP said the system uses OLE automation, which requires MSO to be
installed to work. Even though the created files can be imported into
LO, I gather the OP wants to remove the dependency on MSO completely.

As far as I know, this won't be possible at all; some sort of
workaround will be required. It's been a while since I last looked at
OLE and COM, and I can't remember all the differences between them, but
I understand that the relevant OLE components (are they servers, like
with COM? I forget.) are installed with MSO, and while LO may provide
equivalents, I highly doubt they will be registered under the same
names. Without the vendor agreeing to change the application, if this
bit of code runs without MSO being installed it will produce errors.

If it is possible to not run this code, it may be possible to make an
alternate arrangement, like exporting the data from the database
directly into csv, or some such arrangement.

There might be ways to work around the problem, but you'd need to know
a bit more about the system as a whole.

Paul



On Wed, 11 Dec 2013 08:38:07 -0500
Jay Lozier <jslozier@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 12/11/2013 06:56 AM, Milos Sramek wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > a friend of mine has asked me for help. Their (small) company would 
> > like to get rid of dependency on Microsoft tools. The situation is:
> > They have a company information system, which every now and then 
> > generates a spreadsheet table, which lands in MS Excel on some 
> > computer. For this MS Office ole automation is used. He has asked
> > me, if it is somehow possible to redirect this to LibreOffice.
> > Vendor if the information system has refused to support something
> > like that (a small company fully dependent on MS).
> >
> > Is this somehow possible? Does anybody have experience with it?
> >
> > thanks
> > Milos
> Milos,
>
> I have a few of questions:
>
> What is the backend of the information system? There almost always is
> a database present. Maybe it could configured to save the data in
> another format - most likely csv/tsv. If you are very lucky it may
> support export to ods.
>
> What Excel format are they using? If xls (most likely), directly 
> importing into Calc maybe the easiest solution. If the xlsx, it will 
> probably work but there are reports that xlsx files are more
> problematic.
>
> How complex is the spreadsheet? If it is basically a data with at
> most a few formulas and no outside links or internal links between
> sheets then importing into Calc will be much less troublesome. I
> doubt this is true.
>
> Are there any macros in the Excel spreadsheet? Though I doubt any are 
> present, this would be one area that would make using Calc very
> difficult.
>
> Thinking about your question, I would install LO and try opening
> several of the spreadsheets and see if problems occur. Calc does a
> very good job of opening MSO formats.


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