Thread: xls export function

<div dir="ltr">When will there be xls export ability?  The current csv format does not output all my data correctly.<br
/><br/>thx<br /><br />Ben<br /></div> 

<div dir="ltr">My exporting issue has been resolved.  While I believe xls functionality is needed, my immediate needs
havebeen addressed by Michael.  Thanks.<br /></div> 

Can you be more specific about the problems you ran into? I haven't had
any issues with pgadmin csv export in excel, and I recently implemented
CSV export in one of our applications, so I'm curious as to potential
pitfalls.

Thanks,
-- 
Maciek Sakrejda
Truviso, Inc.
http://www.truviso.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Beyerlein <benbeyerlein@gmail.com>
To: pgadmin-support@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [pgadmin-support] xls export function
Date: Mon, 8 Sep 2008 17:58:25 -0500

My exporting issue has been resolved.  While I believe xls functionality
is needed, my immediate needs have been addressed by Michael.  Thanks.

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 11:58 PM, Ben Beyerlein <benbeyerlein@gmail.com> wrote:
> My exporting issue has been resolved.  While I believe xls functionality is
> needed, my immediate needs have been addressed by Michael.  Thanks.
>

It's unlikely that we'll add xls capabilities as it's a proprietary
format used on just one of the platforms we support - plus no one else
has asked for it until today! I'm more interested in fixing the CSV
issue you've run into.

Who is Michael anyway?

Regards, Dave.

-- 
Dave Page
EnterpriseDB UK:   http://www.enterprisedb.com

Hi,

> It's unlikely that we'll add xls capabilities as it's a proprietary
> format used on just one of the platforms we support - plus no one else
> has asked for it until today! I'm more interested in fixing the CSV
> issue you've run into.

XLS (or Excel XML) output would really be a big benefit (at least for me).
The big problem for me with CSV is that it can't describe datatypes. So
you have to options: a) let excel guess the datatype, which is often
wrong or b) set the datatype explicit at every CSV import for every
column. When you do a LOT data migration (which is a part of my job at
the moment, we're moving to SAP..) this can be very annoying.
To prevent that excel uses a wrong datatype, I don't use CSV export in
PgAdmin at all.
I create a view for each dataset that has to be exported and load the
view with the PostgreSQL ODBC driver to excel. Not very comfortable, but
at least not as error-prone as CSV import.

Creating an excel compatible XML output to PgAdmin shoudn't be to hard,
I've done this before for other tools. I really like to implement this
feature in PgAdmin, but no time atm.
Creating an "real" XLS is probably a bit harder than XML (but in doubt
you can always peek in e.g. perl's great Spreadsheet::WriteExcel module).

Walter