I like the simple spreadsheet called "xspread" for certain uses.
One reason is that I can create simple spread sheets (i.e. the source code it creates for a sheet) with a bit of scripting, if I am working with something where it is useful. I also like that such files are don't have a lot of overhead if I throw them into my cvs archive. I also like that I can modify an existing spread sheet at the source level -- exactly that they warn you not to do -- of course :-). It is just all text. I use "joe" as a text editor, because I still remember the commands from the old WordStar days. Of course xspread has it's limitations. In particular. although the user manual mentions that "macros" can be inserted into the sheet, there is no documentation on what a macro is. Googling for "xspread macros" brought no quick and easy answers. Wonder if I am the last person on the planet to use xspread... I guess I'll have to get the gumption to look into the source code to see if that feature ever was implemented. But if someone out there knows the answer, feel free to share. Had a pretty large spread sheet. It computes my Canadian taxes. (Should probably have converted it to Libre or Open Office before it got so big, and Canadian income tax got increasingly complicated....), but I did want to restructure the order of the rows somewhat to make it prettier. So I bulled ahead and wrote a few pages of python just to be able to swap the order of two ranges of rows, and modify the row numbers and formulas correctly in the spread sheet source. Works OK. That brings me to a more general question. Not all pairs of X applications honor the copy and paste, between them, nor do some input fields on various web pages seem to honor the copy and paste from another window in some X application being used. Then the only way is to repeat stuff by re-keying it. Wish I could just jam a small file into the stream of characters coming from the keyboard. Am I missing something? Should I long ago have figured out how to do that with OpenBSD? Hints would be appreciated. Thanks! Austin Hook Milk River www.computershop.ca
