Revision Date: 2006-03-01
Problem:
Can CHARTrunner be used with Open Office?
Solution:
Open Office is "free" software that positions itself as a replacment for Microsoft Office. Open Office can be dowloaded from:
http://about.openoffice.org/index.html
Calc is the spreadsheet program within Open Office. By default, Calc stores a spreadsheet file with the .ODS file extension.
CHARTrunner cannot directly link to Open Office Calc since (as far as we know) it has no way to read .ODS files. If you know of an OLE DB or ODBC driver that can directly read a .ODS file please let us know about it. However, Open Office allows you to save a Calc worksheet in Microsoft Excel format with the .XLS file extension. When you save an Open Office Calc spreadsheet file with the .XLS extension CHARTrunner treats it just like a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. You can chart from the spreadsheet just as if you were using Excel simply by telling CHARTrunner to open the file as a Microsoft Excel worksheet file.
Writer is the word processor program within Open Office. You can imbed a CHARTrunner chart image into an Open Office Writer document. The Writer application is similar to Microsoft Word. CHARTrunner allows you to save charts as PNG, JPG, and Bitmap images, and any of these image types may be pasted into Writer.
Base is the database program within Open Office. Base uses the HSQL database engine from http://hsqldb.org, and as far as we know there is no ODBC driver or OLE DB provider that will allow CHARTrunner to fetch data from an HSQL database. If you know of an OLE DB or ODBC driver that can fetch data from HSQL please let us know about it. However, when you create a new HSQL database you have the option to link it to an external database such as Microsoft Access, dBase, Text file, ODBC or ADO (OLE DB). Since CHARTrunner can fetch data from all these data sources, it should be possible to use Base to enter or modify data and use CHARTrunner to chart the data. We successfully tested this scenario using a Microsoft Access database.
