[Qgis-developer] Re: Excel Export from QGIS

[Tim Sutton]

Hi Alister

On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 12:55 AM, Alister Hood
<alister.hood at synergine.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

I recently used a python library called xlwt for a web project to
generate spreadsheets. I think it should be fairly straightforward to
create a python plugin that would allow you to do it. I'm not familiar
with a C++ library for writing excel spreadsheets, but I guess there
is one out there somewhere.


Regards

Tim


> Alister
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