[plug] StarOffice

[Leon Brooks]

Matt Kemner wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Feb 2000, David Griffiths wrote:
>> A friend has tried the next (only?) version following (5.1a?) and reported
>> that it wasn't reading 5.1 files properly, ie not properly backwards
>> compatible. I haven't had this comfirmed from other sources though. It's
>> possible that some other things have been fixed/improved in the later
>> version/s though, eg MS Office filters.

> I might have to give it a try - for the last few months I have been unable
> to read the dealer pricelists available from DMA (in excel format) with
> StarOffice 5.1 whereas I'd never had a problem with them earlier (no idea
> what they changed) - I wasn't aware there was a "next" version available
> (I checked Sun's site)

http://firestation.fdns.net/~leonb/DMA.html (229K)

My StarOffice 5.1-not-a won't read them either. Procedure to make the
above:

1. Visit DMA (dma/simplybetter), download EXE (urk) catalog

2. Put the encrypted (!) cattledog EXE into a directory visible to WINE,
and run it (password is same). The website has a password. Why encrypt
the damn thing as well?

3. I did these by hand, but it could easily be scripted... please send
me the script if you do...

3a. run the XLS through xlHtml

3b. find the first an last used rows and columns

3c. run it through xlHTML again, cropping unwanted rows/cols and pages
(just take page 0)

Cheers.