Ooo MSO and strawberries
Differences between OpenOffice Calc and MSO Excel
VBA: OOc does not open new windows. Doors yes, windows no. I have not been able to reproduce the same batch conversion routine to convert Lotus.WK1 files to xls that I made for Excel. It can do lots of stuff with VBA in OO but opening new windows is key. Maybe I just haven't found how yet. But I Googled. And Googled. And everything I found is not what I want. It can open a FilePicker and let you select a single file in a specific directory, but I'm talking hundreds. In different directories. So the FilePicker is out. And it needs to be done without starting up and shutting down the whole program. So the script with the "hidden" switch is out. Also without the need to specify which character set to use each single time a file is opened.
For simple spreadsheets: OO is BETTER!!! You need to get used to inserting a new row ABOVE the selection vs Excel BELOW, but then: OOc keeps copies of cells in memory, where in Excel they are only available till the next different command. Sweet!
Seriously, I can live with it. It's good enough for private use. I won't need to go to jail for keeping lists in Excel, and typing my recipes and love letters. in Word. No more. I'm clean.
OK so that was boring. How about.. food. Today in the supermarket I saw a new premade salad, you know ( blog, you know what I mean, blog? ) the ones that are sold premade, precut, prewashed ( I hope ) and premixed.. basically the ones that are totally bad for the Environment. I buy a lot of those. I do, because sometimes I try to better my life and buy loose separate salad and tomatoes and cucumber vegetable items and end up having to throw half of everything away because it takes too long to finish and they go rotten. There's a yellow cucumber now staring at me from the lonely fruit basket in a decidedly abject and accusing manner. My excuse is thus: I waste less of the premade salads and besides the transparent PET and PE of the packaging make excellent fuel for the municipal waste incinerator.
Um kids..? There is this new salad. It is a mix of greens, pasta, soft Brie cheese and.. STRAWBERRIES! It also has this transparent red jellyish kind of sauce. With pips floating around in it. Basically it is vergetables you cover in thin strawberry jam. With whole strawberries in it too. Whole entire strawberries, including the little green crown. The superkid loves strawberries and so I did not hesitate to buy a bowl of this wonderful strawberry and cheese pasta-salad. When I got home and ( eventually ) put it on his plate, however, his enthusiasm was surprisingly minimal. Even showing him the wrapper from the store, proving that this strange combination of food stuffs was not one of my inventions, strangely failed to convince him. Since the day I made him and a visiting play friend eat a creation that I baptized "Harry Potter Troll Snot" ( and they ate it! ), which was a thin green slippery goo of watery overcooked spinach and mashed potatoes, he has somehow lost all confidence in my cooking. When arguing that this was obviously something that OUGHT to be, since it was bought premade in a store, didn't help, I played the emotions. I acted out my enthusiasm at finding this wondrous new strawberry dish for him... He Who Loves Strawberries, ...followed by my great disappointment at experiencing that he refused to taste it. He lifted his fork. He shoved in a mouthful of the greeneries dripping with the jam. He exclaimed "UGH.. SWEET!". Imagine a facial expression that clearly indicates the monosyllable "sweet" being used here in it's most definite pejorative meaning.
The Harry Potter Troll Snot had long thin Spanish sausages for wands.. you know when Harry sticks his wand in the nose of the troll and vanquishes him. It was brilliant.
I used to use Lotus version 2 a lot and in fact too much. In 1990, I made a Lotussheet which made a so called travel-speed-diagram for a special machine. It took me 4 hours and I used the old style Lotus macro's. That didn't work in Lotus for Windows nor in Excel.
ReplyDeleteMy Lotussheet saved the office many hours of drawing these diagrams. So they spent a lot of time (weeks) to get it converted into Excel. Without any luck. So I just kept an old Lotus version 2 for that sheet. That was still working n Windows98. (I never tried it in XP.)
That is almost exactly what happened here. They built a spreadsheet that calculates hundreds of tables for crane data, in Lotus for DOS.
ReplyDeleteThese data was then ordered in a layout in a book, by hand, in Excel. That was a job they gave me. But I got fed up with it so I wrote a spreadsheet that did it, and which also corrects and finetunes some of the anomalies in the data, and underlines data with certain specifics. But this only works in Excel 2007.
Excel 2007 doesn't read Lotus worksheets, so I have to keep a copy of Excel 2003 for which i have made a batch conversion macro wich converts hundreds of Lotus spreadsheets to Excel.
To achieve this one task, we need the old Lotus, Excel 2003 and Excel 2007.