Re: [Caml-list] Re: OT: Commercial Support and Programming Languages

[Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org>]

On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 04:07:51PM +0000, Jon Harrop wrote:
> Another subject that I have discovered from my work on F# is the usefulness of 
> interoperability, specifically being able to manipulate Excel spreadsheets 
> from F#. I'm writing web analytics software for our company in OCaml and I'd 
> like to inject the results into OpenOffice's spreadsheet. Any idea how to do 
> that?

It's funny you should mention these, because all three are possible
under OCaml (and I've done two and a half of them).

You can manipulate Excel using http://tech.motion-twin.com/ocamole.html
(only OCaml on Windows, mind you).

You can write Excel spreadsheets via a number of routes.  Probably
easiest is to use the CSV library from http://merjis.com/developers/csv
to write CSV files, which is exactly what we did for web log analysis
(http://merjis.com/developers/weblogs).  Another alternative is to go
via perl4caml & use the Perl module which does this.

Writing OpenOffice spreadsheets is easier because you can write ODF
directly, and put it into a ZIP file in the right format using
something like CamlZip.  I did this for OO writer documents, and have
some code if you want to take a look at it.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat