[Qgis-developer] Re: Excel Export from QGIS

[Alister Hood]

Hi everybody,
Just a couple of thoughts:

As others have mentioned, many people want to export to Excel mainly for
formatting and printing, perhaps with some added calculations.  The
ideal would be to improve formatting and printing in QGIS so that this
isn't necessary.
Spreadsheets aren't particularly great for it anyway, and doing it in
QGIS would mean that you wouldn't need to export and format again if the
data is updated.
I imagine this could eventually be quite a lot of work - perhaps it
would be a good idea for a Summer of Code project.  I guess it would
include work on:
- table formatting
- number formatting (also see #4426, although that is not about
specifying how data in an existing column is displayed).
- virtual columns (similar to the new expression based labelling).
- easy breaking of tables across multiple pages, page numbering etc.

Some people also like to export data to Excel, modify it, and bring it
back into GIS.  Like someone said, this is a recipe for headaches, if
not disaster.  I think it would be great if we could identify any
further enhancements to the attribute table and the field calculator
which would help people not to do this.

Alister