MS Office ole automation

users
#1

Hi,

a friend of mine has asked me for help. Their (small) company would like to get rid of dependency on Microsoft tools. The situation is:
They have a company information system, which every now and then generates a spreadsheet table, which lands in MS Excel on some computer. For this MS Office ole automation is used. He has asked me, if it is somehow possible to redirect this to LibreOffice. Vendor if the information system has refused to support something like that (a small company fully dependent on MS).

Is this somehow possible? Does anybody have experience with it?

thanks
Milos

#2

Milos,

I have a few of questions:

What is the backend of the information system? There almost always is a database present. Maybe it could configured to save the data in another format - most likely csv/tsv. If you are very lucky it may support export to ods.

What Excel format are they using? If xls (most likely), directly importing into Calc maybe the easiest solution. If the xlsx, it will probably work but there are reports that xlsx files are more problematic.

How complex is the spreadsheet? If it is basically a data with at most a few formulas and no outside links or internal links between sheets then importing into Calc will be much less troublesome. I doubt this is true.

Are there any macros in the Excel spreadsheet? Though I doubt any are present, this would be one area that would make using Calc very difficult.

Thinking about your question, I would install LO and try opening several of the spreadsheets and see if problems occur. Calc does a very good job of opening MSO formats.

#3

Hi,

The OP said the system uses OLE automation, which requires MSO to be
installed to work. Even though the created files can be imported into
LO, I gather the OP wants to remove the dependency on MSO completely.

As far as I know, this won't be possible at all; some sort of
workaround will be required. It's been a while since I last looked at
OLE and COM, and I can't remember all the differences between them, but
I understand that the relevant OLE components (are they servers, like
with COM? I forget.) are installed with MSO, and while LO may provide
equivalents, I highly doubt they will be registered under the same
names. Without the vendor agreeing to change the application, if this
bit of code runs without MSO being installed it will produce errors.

If it is possible to not run this code, it may be possible to make an
alternate arrangement, like exporting the data from the database
directly into csv, or some such arrangement.

There might be ways to work around the problem, but you'd need to know
a bit more about the system as a whole.

Paul

#4

Hi :slight_smile:
LibreOffice can read MS formats. It's better with the older MS
formats such as .xls. Newer versions of MS Office often run into
problems with their own formats too. It's entirely possible that
upgrading to a newer version of MS Office will also break the current
system.

Best idea is to test-drive LibreOffice on 1 machine there and try a
few thing out. It might be worth test-driving a newer version of MS
Office on the same or different machine in order to compare the 2.

Also think MIGRATION instead of switch-over. So the next stage after
test-driving would be to keep all the existing versions of MS Office
but install LibreOffice alongside.

Note that the migration route allows people to easily revert to
systems that they are familiar with. People begin to familiarise
themselves with the new system at their own pace (with a gentle push).
It's not a route that Microsoft offers (at least not easily). The MS
route is to rip the existing system away from users requiring them to
be retrained in the newer one immediately, often blaming users and
making them feel inadequate or resentful. The migration route means
people's productivity doesn't drop so much during the process.

The question is do you really need to pay tons of money in order to
carry on doing the same thing you are doing at the moment?
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#5

Hi,

thank you all for reaction. I see that this is not a trivial problem - we will search further.

best
Milos

Dňa 2013-12-11 15:07, Paul wrote / napísal(a):

#6

Hi Milos,

We basicly had the same problem. We still have a MS licence on our
servers, but most of the workstations have LO installed.

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