[Qgis-developer] Re: Excel Export from QGIS

[Bob and Deb]

This discussion reminds me of the reasons why I'm excited about the
Vistrails plugin for QGIS (see http://code.googlegroups.com/p/eo4vistrails/).
Has anyone given it a try yet?
On Dec 1, 2011 11:34 PM, "Alister Hood" <alister.hood at synergine.com> wrote:

> Hi Tim,
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Tim Sutton [mailto:lists at linfiniti.com]
> > Sent: Friday, 2 December 2011 7:16 p.m.
> > To: Alister Hood
> > Cc: qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
> > Subject: Re: [Qgis-developer] Re: Excel Export from QGIS
> >
> > 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.
>
> Sure, import/export of spreadsheet formats would definitely be nice.  It
> would be great if someone implemented it.
> And I'm not saying it would be a technical disaster; more of an
> organisational disaster.  After a user exports to excel and formats it all
> nicely for printing, they would need to export and format again every time
> they want to print, if the original data changes.  Hopefully they won't be
> doing much in Excel other than formatting to get the data ready for
> printing, or it could get quite painful.
> If they're exporting to Excel to process the data and then import it back
> into QGIS, there will be all sorts of added complications e.g. because of
> separating the attribute data from the features, and because Excel won't
> respect and preserve the data type of each field.
>
> I'm an engineer - I work with Word and Excel all day every day.  But often
> (or perhaps mostly) they are not really the right tools for the job, and we
> need to do all sorts of nasty hackery to get the job done.
> Basically I'm just saying that in most of the cases where someone would go
> from QGIS to Excel, Excel is not the ideal tool for the job, and with some
> improvements QGIS definitely would be.
>
> Alister
> _______________________________________________
> Qgis-developer mailing list
> Qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/attachments/20111201/0817d2d3/attachment.html