[plug] migrating to Linux.

[Peter Wright]

Hi Alex,

On 22/09 13:30:33, Alex Polglaze wrote:
> Is there a way to covert existing Lotus 123 and Wordpro files in the
> respective formats to .xls and .doc format so that they can be
> loaded into Open Office?
>
> Unfortunately, OO still does not have a conversion from the Lotus format.

Nah, looks like nothing does. I suspect (a) Lotus never bothered to
open their formats, and (b) not enough people used it for anyone to be
bothered reverse-engineering those formats and writing a converter.

> If there is no short way, it means manually opening 23 years worth of 
> existing files one at a time and "SAVE AS" into the the MS format

As one of the other followups suggested, I reckon the best approach
*would* be to use Lotus' "export-to-Excel/Word" functionality, but
don't do it manually.

Grab the free version of WinBatch - http://www.winbatch.com/ - and
make yourself a little Windows "macro" that

* uses a running Lotus 1-2-3 to open each 1-2-3 file (put all the
  "to-be-converted" files into a directory by themselves, so you can
  easily make Lotus open them one-by-one),
* export the file to the newest Microsoft Excel format (probably best
  to save it into a different directory),
* close the file,
* do it another 1000 times (for however many files you need to
  convert).

Then do almost exactly the same for the Wordpro files.


It's well worth learning just enough WinBatch to do a little task
like this, BTW. You wouldn't believe how useful it can be when you're
trying to automate simple tasks in Windows.

> and then doing the same in OO.

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2006/01/11/from-microsoft-to-openoffice.html

Short summary - you can (fairly) easily adapt a simple OpenOffice
macro (as shown in the article) to batch-convert bazillions of files
from (for example) MS Word format to OpenOffice format.

So, at least in theory, if you can use the Lotus program to "export"
all the 123/Wordpro files into Excel/Word files, you should then be
able to batch-convert all those Excel/Word files into OpenOffice
Calc/Writer files.

I don't think you'll need to use Microsoft Office itself at any stage
of the process.

> Seems a complete waste of time to me.

Indeed it does (the manual way, that is). So don't do it like that. :)

> Alex

Pete.
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