I have a wellformatted excel file with a lot of macros and styling in it that I want to keep.
Then i have this information I want to enter in the file.
And I want to do it with ruby.
I've tried roo and spreadsheet but they don't seem able to actually edit the file, just create a new one and loosing all the formattin in the process.
It feels it should be simple to just edit the cells I want and save the file again but obviously it's more complex that I originally though(or I'm completely blind)
Any help is appreciated.
I'm learning ruby at the moment so that's why I would prefer a solution in ruby.
If you know there are better suited laguages for this feel free to point me in the right direction and I'll check it out.
Thanks in advance
Speaking from experience, there is no Ruby gem that would handle Excel files with all bells, whistles, macros and styling. It is a pity, because Excel is squarely the finest of Microsoft products. In my experience, spreadsheet library can import legacy data from Excel, LibreOffice Calc etc. (I'm not sure about Gnumeric).
As for your problem of getting data from Ruby to Excel, I suggest that you first save Ruby output as a separate file (spreadsheet, CSV, text...) and then teach Excel to import it (eg. using macros).
Another possibility is to abandon Excel for data processing tasks (and possibly keep it for data presentation tasks). Excel is great for presentation and simple data processing, but very bad for complex algorithms.
I wrote gems yzz and y_nelson, which I intended as Ruby replacement for spreadsheets. Yzz provides Ted Nelson's ZZ structures in Ruby (ZZ structure is an improved version of spreadsheet data structure) and y_nelson mixes it with Petri nets (because Petri nets are an improved version of Excel cell functions). Mathematically speaking, a spreadsheed is a hybrid between some sort of multidimensional orthogonal grid of data cells plus a Petri net execution engine. With y_nelson, I hope to bring dearly missed Excel functionality into Ruby, while at the same time moving one step towards better abstraction.
Related
I have created a certificate design with powerpoint.
Now I have to create 100+ copies of it... each with a different name (the recipent).
I was wondering if there was an easy way to do it...
I can have the list of names in excel or txt.
I am open to other ideas as well, like changing the slide into an images and batch processing it in a simple way
You may also try out SlideMight, a tool for merging hierarchical data with PowerPoint templates. SlideMight supports iteration over data, to generate slides or to populate tables. There is more functionality, but you don't seem to need that. SlideMight is in fact a coding system, like mail merge for Word is.
Input data format is at this time just JSON; you would need to convert your Excel sheets first, e.g. using this Excel to JSON add-in for Excel.
There are versions for Windows and Mac OS X.
More information is at www.SlideMight.com
Disclaimer:
I am the owner of Delftware Technology, the company that developed SlideMight.
And I am one of the developers.
This is a question that really belongs in SuperUser, not StackOverflow (which is intended for coding questions, not software how-to-use questions).
But ...
Save your names to a plain notepad TXT file, one name per line.
Start PowerPoint, choose File, Open and point to your TXT file (you may force the matter by choosing . in Files of type:
Apply whatever template you like to the result.
I have a commercial add-in that'll do this and quite a bit more, but from your description, you don't need it.
I like reading the PoC||GTFO issues and one thing I found remarkable when I first discovered it, was the "polyglot" nature of their PDF files.
Let met explain: when you consider for example their 8th issue, you may unzip files from it; execute the encryption they are talking about by running it as a script and even better(worse?) with their 9th issue you can even play it as a music file!
I'm currently in the process of writing small scripts every week and writing each time a little one page PDF in LaTeX to explain the said scripts. So I would really enjoy being able to create the same kind of PDF files. Sadly they explained (partly) in their first issue how to include zip files, but they did so through three small sketches of cmd lines without actual explanations.
So my question is basically :
how can one create such a polyglot PDF file containing stuff like a zip as well as being a shell script which may be run using arguments just like normal scripts?
I'm asking here about the process of creation, not just an explanation of how this is possible. The ideal way for me would that there are already some scripts or programs allowing to create easily such PDF files.
I've tried to search the net for the keywords "polyglot files" and others of the kind and wasn't able to find any useful matches. Maybe this process has another name?
I've already read the presentation by Julia Wolf which explains how things works, but I sadly haven't had time to apply the knowledge there to real world, because I'm sadly not used to play with file headers and the way a PDF is constructed.
EDIT:
Okay, I've read more and found the 7th edition of PoC||GTFO to be really informative concerning this subject. I may end up being able to create my own scripts to do such polyglot PDF files if I have some more time to consider it.
I played around with polyglots myself after attending Ange's talks and also talking to him in person. You really need to understand the file formats to be able to nest them into each other.
However, long story short, here are some links I found extremely useful for creating polyglots:
Some older Google Code Trunk
PoC of the polyglot stuff
Especially the second link (to github) will help you creating polyglots, but also understanding how they are working and how they are implemented. Since it is mostly Python stuff and very well / clean written, it is very useful and easy to follow.
I feel dissecting some file formats would be a good place to start. You can find many file format specifications for different file types through Google, but they can be a tough read and will likely take you some time to translate into whatever language you are using.
PDF: https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/pdfs/PDF32000_2008.pdf
ELF: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15213-s00/doc/elf.pdf
ZIP: http://kat.sdf.org/zip_file_format.txt
The language(s) you select will need a way to read and write raw bytes (not just ascii alphanumeric), so perhaps C would be good for more direct access to memory. Some Python tricks could help with open sourcing the scripts easily.
To dissect the files, you may want to build a tool kinda like https://github.com/kvesel/zipbrk/ to take them apart, then put them all back together in a polyglot format. For example, zip does not require the section headers to be at the start (or even contiguous for that matter), and PDF magic number can appear in multiple places within the file as well. I also believe I recall a polyglot tool being included in one of the PoC||GTFO publishings (maybe issue 8 or 2??) as a polyglot in the pdf file.
Don't forget the hackers bible! :)
https://nostarch.com/gtfo
I need some gem/plugin to create an Excel spreadsheet with formulas to use in my Rails application. Any suggestions?
I've used Roo and it's quite good and easy to do spreadsheet processing (once you get all the gem dependencies installed). However, it doesn't support formulas natively. It won't eval the formula and return the result (this would be difficult I think -- use the excel engine?) but it will give you the text of the formula, for example:
=SUM(.A1,.B1)
It'd be pretty easy to handle this specific case but if you have many different formulas and functions then rolling your own evaluator is going to be difficult. Going and getting A1 and B1 to add them together is very doable with Roo. It's just a question of how complex your formulas are.
writeexcel does it wonderfully!
I think you should create blank Excel file with formulas and then fill it with Rails. Because you can't create formulas with Ruby.
There's a spreadsheet gem listed on RubyGems but having never used it I can't recommend it.
I would like to represent data that gives an overview but allows them to drill down in an inline fashion - so if you had a grouping of say 6 objects the user could expand the data and it would show the 6 objects immeadiately below it before any more high level data.
It would appear that MSHFlexgrid gives this ability but I can't find any information about actually using it, or what it's limitations are (can you have differing number of fields and/or can they have different spacing, what about column headers, indentation at for the start, etc).
I found this site, but the images are broken (in ie8 and ff3.5). Google searches show people just using the flat data representation but nothing using the hierarchical properties). Does anyone know any good tutorials or forums with a good discussion about pitfalls?
Due to lack of information about using it, I am thinking of coding my own version but if anyone has done work in this area I haven't found it - I would of thought it would be a natural wish for data representation. If someone has coded a version of this (any language) then I wouldn't mind reading about it - maybe my idea of how to do it wouldn't be the best way.
You might want to check out vbAccelerator. He has a Multi-Column Treeview control that sounds like what you may be looking for. He gives you the source and has some pretty decent samples.
The MSHFlexGrid reference pages and the "using the MSHFlexGrid" topic in the Visual Basic manual?
Sorry if you've already looked at these!
For example, right now I have a roll-my-own solution that uses data files that include blocks like:
PlayerCharacter Fighter
Hitpoints 25
Strength 10
StartPosition (0, 0, 0)
Art
Model BigBuffGuy
Footprint LargeFootprint
end
InventoryItem Sword
InventoryItem Shield
InventoryItem HealthPotion
end
human editable (w/ minimal junk characters, ideally)
resilient to errors (fewest 'wow i can't parse anything useful anymore' style errors, and thus i've lost all of the data in the rest of the file) - but still able to identify and report them, of course. My example the only complete failure case is missing 'end's.
nested structure style data
array/list style data
customizable foundation types
fast
Are there any well known solutions that meet/exceed these requirements?
Yaml is a good solution and very close to what you have. Search for it.
I second the YAML suggestion. It's extremely easy to edit, very forgiving of mistakes and widely supported (especially among the dynamic languages).
I'd say the most common choices are:
JSON (offical site) - very flexible, though the punctuation can take a bit for people to get used to
INI - super simple to use, but a bit limited in data-types
XML - pretty flexible, common, but way too verbose sometimes
You could try JSON available at: http://www.json.org/
It was designed for javascript and web usage initially. But it's pretty clean, and supported in many languages.
Lua was designed to be a programming language where the syntax lets you easily use it as a markup language as well, so that you include data files as if they were code. Many computer games use it for their scripting, such as World of Warcraft due to its speed and ease of use. However it's originally designed and maintained for the energy industry so there's a serious background.
Scheme with its S-expressions is also a very nice but different-looking syntax for data. Finally, you've got XML that has the benefit of the most entry-level developers knowing it. You can also roll your own well-defined and efficient parser with a nice development suite such as ANTLR.
I would suggest JSON.
Just as readable/editable as YAML
If you happen to use for Web then can be eval()'ed into JavaScript objects
Probably as cross language as YAML