[melbourne-pug] Excel spreadsheet munging under Linux. Limits?

[Sam Watkins]

On Tue, Feb 04, 2014 at 04:39:13PM +1100, Javier Candeira wrote:
> Yes, I have now received the template sheets, and they are .xlsx, not
> xls. I'm doing a round of trying different Python libraries, see what
> happens.

I'm fairly sure there are public python libraries that can preserve
an xlsx template and only change the data.  I have looked into it.

However, I am developing a program called xlsx_format that does this.
The xlsx format is a fairly simple zip of XML files.  I previously
helped build an 'xls_format' at work using perl.  I was attempting to
program xlsx_format as a collection of tools tied together in a shell
script (as an experiment in "flow based programming") but I did not
complete that yet.

I can instead do it in python as a libary (and tool), if that's useful.

So far, I have been working on xlsx_format in my spare time and intend
to release it to the public domain or CC0, so you can use it however you
like and we can also use it at work.

I am thinking that it should take a collection of 'tables' as input.
I'm not sure the best way to represent them, perhaps as an iterable of
dicts.

Please let me know what you think, and if you have any other requirements.

Sam