Importing financial report into Write

users
#1

I want to print a financial report worth data from my accounting program.

The program produces a couple of formats for exporting the data- a text file, a html format that Libreoffice won't display correctly and a csv.

Here is a part of a report

Net Worth
As of: 30/05/2014

Account Amount
Journal A$ 1,250.00
New Life Ministries A$ 793.09
Orphanage Account A$ 796.20

To get the kind of formatting I need, I could just import the text file and make each line expand to fill the width of the page. I can't see any way to do this- full justification doesn't apply to the last line in a paragraph- which is every line.

Alternatively I could import it into a table, but it all gets put into a single cell.

I imported it into a spreadsheet then copied it from there into Write. That worked out, but it is a bit clumsy.

Is there a way to directly import the data in a way that produces easily readable data without an intermediate step?

#2

Hi Alan,

Amongst other things, I need the Account Balances and Profit and Loss statements in the same document. But I also need to produce a clearly readable document so that amounts line up etc. Other reasons I want to edit the document include to add a logo plus comments.

The financial software produces information that looks like this:

Item1 $32.00
Item 2 $3257091.23

Whereas I want it to look like this:

Item1 $32.00
Item 2 $3257091.23

A table would be ideal as you can add borders etc, but that's not essential.

I used to export the data as html which used to import directly into LO, but now LO just shows all the html code rather than the formatted document. So then I used to open the html file in a web browser and copy and paste the page into LO. But the latest version of the financial program (moneydance) has changed what it puts into the html so that even passing it through a web browser just results in a list similar to that above.

Hope that clarifies my aim.

#3

I've had a couple of replies off list, and with more playing around I discovered I can open the html in a browser, copy it there and use Paste Special- html code to import it into LO Writer. If there is a better way to just import and format as described below I would be happy to know that.

Keith

#4

Keith,

You could try this :

http://sourceforge.net/projects/csv2odf/

Alex

#5

I want to print a financial report worth data from my accounting program. The program produces a couple of formats for exporting the data - a text file, a html format that Libreoffice won't display correctly and a csv.

Open the CSV file in LibreOffice Calc. Copy the relevant cells. Paste into a text (Writer) document, but using Edit | Paste Special... (or right-click | Paste Special... or Ctrl+Shift+V) instead of ordinary Paste. In the Paste Special dialogue, select "HTML (HyperText Markup Language)" or "Formatted text [RTF]". You will now have the material in a table, which you can manipulate easily as you wish.

To get the kind of formatting I need, I could just import the text file and make each line expand to fill the width of the page. I can't see any way to do this - full justification doesn't apply to the last line in a paragraph - which is every line.

You can do that (but it's probably not your best solution):
o Go to Format | Paragraph... | Alignment (or right-click | Paragraph... | Alignment).
o Under Options, select Justified.
o For "Last line", select Justified.
Better still, you can set this in paragraph style.

I imported it into a spreadsheet then copied it from there into Write. That worked out, but it is a bit clumsy.

I suspect that's the easiest you'll get ...

Amongst other things, I need the Account Balances and Profit and Loss statements in the same document.

Combining information from multiple sources can very likely be done most easily in the intermediate stage in the spreadsheet.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker

#6

Thanks Brian.

It turns out I can use "Paste Special" to paste the html direct from web browser to Writer.

Keith

#7

Thanks for that suggestion Alex. It looks like a very useful and versatile tool. I will give it a try.