how to do live data feeds to Open Office Calc spreadsheets

Fri Nov 24 20:37:42 UTC 2006

On 11/24/06, bob <ican-rZHaEmXdJNJWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> FYI.   I did a quick experiment with Calc using the "Link External Data"
> feature to connect a Calc spreadsheet to a simple text file.
>
> As long at the text file was a simple HTML table as in:
>
> <html>
> <body>
> <table>
> <tr>
> <td>4</td>
> <td>79</td>
> <td>77</td>
> </tr>
> <tr>
> <td>6</td>
> <td>7</td>
> <td>8</td>
> </tr>
> </table>
> </body>
> </html>
>
> I was able to get the corresponding cells in the Calc spreadsheet to reflect
> the data in the text file (after the default 60 refresh polling period).
> In other words on another console I could vi the text file,  change a value,
> wait for 60 secs and the spreadsheet cell would be updated.   Magic.
>
> Now all I have to do is write a background process to convert the data logger
> output into a html formated text file and my kludge should work ...
>
> I'm going to date myself here.   Way back in the late 80's I worked in a lab
> which used Macs.    The Mac software had a feature called publish and
> subscribe which allowed us to connect a live feed from a QNX system into
> graphical content in a Wordperfect report.   ie. data in the feed changed and
> the graph in the report automatically updated itself.
>
> Now 17+ years later ... oh well that's progress sometimes.

Yeah, that's the sort of thing that Xess / NeXS have been doing for
(probably ~20 years :-)) now.

Both are commercial spreadsheets long available on Linux (and other
platforms where X works) which offered the ability to connect in real
time data sources.

Gnumeric and OpenOffice.org have both suffered from being inferior in
various ways because their makers have been pretty hell-bound on
more-or-less bug-for-bug compatibility with Excel, as opposed to
trying to innovate by doing things that Excel doesn't.

Or of "innovating" by copying features from other products like
Xess/NeXS...  (What is peculiar is that if they recreated features
like those in Xess/NeXS, they'd be widely regarded as "ground
breaking" even though those features might be 20 years old in other
products...)

The other interesting thing in Xess/NeXS was having an API to allow
you to control the spreadsheet pretty deeply via scripts.  Amiga users
would be familiar with that idea, offered widely on that platform via
AREXX...
-- 
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"...  memory leaks  are  quite acceptable  in  many applications  ..."
(Bjarne Stroustrup, The Design and Evolution of C++, page 220)
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