Drew Jensen wrote:
Smaller organizations however tend to go the other way around..the
spreadsheet is the data collector. It is just easier to do it this way.
Create a new file and start entering data. However, if they then need
for some reason, or just want to, move it to a database environment -
transferring from SS to DB can be a much more challenging
experience..and on that score OO.o is, if not weak, at least not robust
in user friendly tools, IMO.
We get a lot of data in Excel format and we use Calc to convert it to
DBF. To avoid the conversion problem you mention, we normally just stick
“,c” after the column title name to force conversion into character
format before it is saved to DBF. That is, if cell A1 contained the
value “NAME” we would change it to “NAME,c”.
That avoids a lot of problems.
On the rare occasion that we want something to revert to genuine
database numeric format or database datetime format we can change the
type within the DBF file. But that is very rarely needed.
We have a routine that will add the “,c” and convert automatically, but
we normally do it manually, because at that point we want to actually
look at the input file and often want to change the column names to
better fit our own norms for example “Customer Address Line 1” to “ADDR1,c”.
Jim Allan
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