Hacker News Reader

Comment by ejr | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for writing this. Do you have plans to extend this to any locally stored spreadsheets? Ex: Excel, Calc (Libre and Open Office) and so on. I imagine even XML based documents would still present some vendor quirks to overcome.

View on HN

I have considered it, and just opened an issue to track demand (https://github.com/Widdershin/butterdb/issues/14). I would probably use another library to handle parsing (and hopefully avoid some of those pitfalls), just like I rely on gspread to handle all Google Spreadsheets integration.

If you'd use butterdb if it had that feature, please let me know.

Thank you. I would use it right now actually as I do have some spreadsheets with Google. There are some I'd rather use locally like this and it would be just a nice extra. It would also avoid the need to maintain a network connection.

I'll definitely implement that at some point then. It's quite easy to swap out the database the model is backed by, so shouldn't be too hard.

I explored this a bit (based off of the javascript-based http://sheetjs.com/sexql/) but the biggest difficulty is that people use CSVs and excel files in completely different ways for the same general task. In particular, different people set up budget workbooks in very different ways. There are also input problems and invalid files to deal with, so even if you manage to craft a meaningful integration you'd still have to figure out how to determine the structure and fix subtle non-uniformities

Reply on news.ycombinator.com