in reply to Re: how to consolidate xls/csv/text into one report?
in thread how to consolidate xls/csv/text into one report?

Thanks for the tip. Hitting the search engines for

dbd anydata excel

I came up with modules for reading Excel files which mentions (among others):

UPDATE: TieExcel seemed initially promising, only, quoting from the documentation:

"Quirks You can't, for now, write anywhere else than the active workbook, and Excel must be open for all this to work. In the best M$ tradition, this and other quite obvious and necessary features will be available in some future version."

But despite this I may try it out anyway, I like this easy excel/perl hash equivelancy, I think this is what would make it easiest for me to figure out how to clean up my spreasheets.

  • Comment on Re^2: how to consolidate xls/csv/text into one report?

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Re^3: how to consolidate xls/csv/text into one report?
by jZed (Prior) on Apr 29, 2005 at 15:18 UTC
    If you are going to dump into a database anyway, it would seem simpler to to treat your input sources as databases also. I suggested DBD::AnyData becuase it supports multiple formats. It can import from any DBI accessible data source, including CSV, many different text formats, and Excel (with DBD::Excel). This means that you can use DBI to read all of your data regardless of its format and to write your data. In a situation such as you are describing that makes a lot more sense then using one module to read Excel, another to read CSV, a third to read text format foo and a fourth to read text format bar and a fifth to write the data. Actually DBD::AnyData makes use of those other modules (e.g. it would be using the excellent Spreadsheet::ParseExcel to actually read the Excel sheet or the excellent XML::Twig to read XML files), but provides you with a single interface to those modules and to the other parsing modules so that your script only needs one interface rather than one interface per format.
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