[Qgis-developer] Re: Excel Export from QGIS

[Alister Hood]

Also see
http://fosslc.org/drupal/content/earth-observation-scientific-workflows-
distributed-computing-environment

 

From: Alister Hood 
Sent: Friday, 2 December 2011 9:01 p.m.
To: 'Bob and Deb'
Cc: Tim Sutton; qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: RE: [Qgis-developer] Re: Excel Export from QGIS

 

That link should be http://code.google.com/p/eo4vistrails/
<http://code.google.com/p/eo4vistrails/>  J

 

From: Bob and Deb [mailto:bobdebm at gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, 2 December 2011 8:47 p.m.
To: Alister Hood
Cc: Tim Sutton; qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: RE: [Qgis-developer] Re: Excel Export from QGIS

 

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
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