Part of the software I work on uses an Excel sheet to store the user error messages & their translations. We run a macro which generates a set of internationalized text files & matching header files that are then copied into our version control system (the spreadsheet is also in Version Control) and used as part of our build.
I’d like to automate our build better, pulling the xls, running the macro, then copying the files to the correct location before compiling our source. Our build boxes are all Linux based.
I’ve tried loading the XLS in OpenOffice.org and running the macro, but that does not appear to work.
Is there any option, or am I SOL until we can convince the stakeholders that we need to use a format other than Excel to store this data?
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Answer
It’s not the format you use to store the data that is giving you problems. It’s the format you use to store the logic. Data stored in Excel is accessible on Linux. Logic embedded in Excel macros is not.
How complicated are those macros? Any chance you could reproduce them in another form (Perl?). In that case you could programmatically extract the data from the .XLS, and the logic can run anywhere there is a Perl engine.