Hi,
The functionality that I rely on to do this operation in ArcGIS and
MapInfo is the windows clipboard - if tab delimited data is present on
the clipboard, then it will paste with the expected tabular format into
Excel (and many other applications). This is far and away the quickest
method I have found (in terms of UI actions - clicks / keypresses) for
transferring attribute data out of a GIS and is not format or software
specific.
QuantumGIS already has this functionality available from the attribute
table (QGIS v1.7.1), however the clipboard data generated by QGIS also
contains a WKT representation of the geometry along with the attribute
columns. A useful extension to the existing functionality would be to be
able to disable the WKT column transfer in some way which would
significantly reduce the volume of data being transferred via the
clipboard, and consequently speed up the process.
Whilst I would always try this method over exporting to an intermediate
file, whether that is CSV or Excel native, I suspect that with very
large numbers of records there may be problems with system resources, so
the file method is probably useful in addition.
Being a Windows user with little experience of Linux though, I'm not
sure whether this method is also applicable in that OS family.
Andy
Andreas Neumann wrote:
Hi,
It is a common requirement that users want to export a QGIS attribute
table to Excel/CSV/Spreadsheet. While CSV is probably easy, the other
two are probably more complex, but there are some good Python
libraries around. For my users, Excel is the most requested table
export format.
I wonder if this could be made into the core, as I think that most
other user want that as well. The idea is to have an export button for
the table, choose the format (CSV, Excel, Openoffice) and let the user
select if he wants all data export, or only filtered or selected rows.
I guess it would be best to use Python for that purpose, as Python has
some good Excel libraries:
* pyExcelerator: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyexcelerator/ (Excel
97/2000/XP/2003)
* xlrd und xlwt (reader/writer): http://www.python-excel.org (Excel
2.0 to 2007)
* openpyxl: https://bitbucket.org/ericgazoni/openpyxl/wiki/Home (Excel
2007 and higher)
Do any of you have experience with one of the above listed packages or
any other recommendations? How about OpenOffice writing?
Goal: cross platform without the need to have MSOffice or OpenOffice
installed.
Would this be best implemented in C++ or in Python?
Who else would be interested in such functionality?
Thanks,
Andreas
--
Andy Harfoot
GeoData Institute
University of Southampton
Southampton
SO17 1BJ
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 2719
Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2849
www.geodata.soton.ac.uk
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