[Qgis-developer] Excel Export from QGIS attribute table

[Alex Mandel]

On 12/01/2011 12:32 AM, Andreas Neumann wrote:
> Hi Alex,
>
>> 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 I agree - for me, CSV export would be good enough. However,
> my users demand Excel. The CSV importer in Openoffice is very good, in
> Excel it sucks (at least in version 2003 which we have). It is just too
> complicated for our users to import the CSV in Excel. These are not GIS
> or DB users - they are just regular users with no experience in data
> importing.
>
> Often, the goal is to format and print the selected data from the
> attributes. For that purpose being able to quickly export to a
> spreadsheet would be benefitial.
>
>> 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.
>
> this would be useful as well ;-)
>
> Andreas
>

Excel 2007 or later doesn't ask about any import details. I just spent 
the week writing instructions on how to force it to do the import dialog 
to prevent insane auto-formatting. You actually have to change the 
extension to something other than .csv to force it in 2007/2010.

I think we should be able to come up with something, and the spatialite 
stuff sounds like a good option.

Thanks,
Alex