[Qgis-developer] Excel Export from QGIS attribute table

[Alex Mandel]

On 12/01/2011 12:19 AM, Andreas Neumann wrote:
> Hi,
>
> It is a common requirement that users want to export a QGIS attribute
> table to Excel/CSV/Spreadsheet. While CSV is probably easy, the other
> two are probably more complex, but there are some good Python libraries
> around. For my users, Excel is the most requested table export format.
>
> I wonder if this could be made into the core, as I think that most other
> user want that as well. The idea is to have an export button for the
> table, choose the format (CSV, Excel, Openoffice) and let the user
> select if he wants all data export, or only filtered or selected rows.
>
> I guess it would be best to use Python for that purpose, as Python has
> some good Excel libraries:
>
> * pyExcelerator: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyexcelerator/ (Excel
> 97/2000/XP/2003)
> * xlrd und xlwt (reader/writer): http://www.python-excel.org (Excel 2.0
> to 2007)
> * openpyxl: https://bitbucket.org/ericgazoni/openpyxl/wiki/Home (Excel
> 2007 and higher)
>
> Do any of you have experience with one of the above listed packages or
> any other recommendations? How about OpenOffice writing?
>
> Goal: cross platform without the need to have MSOffice or OpenOffice
> installed.
>
> Would this be best implemented in C++ or in Python?
>
> Who else would be interested in such functionality?
>
> Thanks,
> Andreas
>

My biggest question is why do you need anything other than CSV? Excel 
and OpenOffice both open CSV automatically already. Both also open dbf, 
though saving back to either csv or dbf can be extremely tricky. Not to 
mention everything else scientific can use csv - for example R, python, etc.

Personally spreadsheets are a good way to ruin your data quick, though 
they can be useful for one off final formatting of tables for 
presentations and quick calculations.

I'd be much more interested in reading of xls, xlsx, ods etc as tables 
for joining or generating spatial X,Y layers.

Thanks,
Alex