[Tfug] Bulk OpenOffice Conversion

[Claude Rubinson]

On Thu, May 24, 2007 at 03:51:17PM -0700, Jim Secan wrote:
> OK, truth-be-told, I was hoping for something really easy along the lines of:
> 
> cat asciiColumn.txt | openoffice --Calc --noGUI --TextIn --ExcelOut > xxx.xls

Useless use of cat!  Should be `ooffice --Calc --noGUI --TextIn --ExcelOut < asciiColumn.txt > xxx.xls`

Seriously, though, you've just nailed my number one complaint of
OpenOffice, Mozilla/Firefox, and the whole breed of GNOME/KDE/etc
office suites and productivity applications: they're not Unix.  I want
ooffice to be a library with a GUI bolted on.  I want Firefox to be an
HTML pager on steroids.  I want to be able to control them, break them
apart, rebuild them, and extend them into the tools that I need,
rather than what the designers and developers think I need.

I think that I just described Emacs.

C.