[development] Open Office

[Samuel Rose]

Louis,

Maybe you can talk more about what you envision, in terms of what you wish
you could do with open office documents, spreadsheets, presentations,
drawings, etc?

I have worked with http://www.softwaregarden.com/products/wikicalc/ for a
while (a spreadsheet written in Perl, that uses a flat-file data storage
system). I have been trying to think about how to do something similar to
wikiCalc in Drupal. There were some folks exploring this for a while at
http://groups.drupal.org/spreadsheets-drupal but it has gone kind of quiet.
wikiCalc is probably the best existing example of a really good way to work
with web based spreadsheets (designed by Dan Bricklin, the programmer of the
original Calc software). wikiCalc actually already supports the import and
export of spreadsheets via csv, xml, and tab seperated (also can export
"Live Views" of spreadsheet via javascript to embed on other pages, with
link back to edit spreadsheet).

Alas, as stated wikiCalc is written in Perl, but I am discussing ideas with
folks about getting funding for porting this to PHP/RDBMS/Drupal as a
module. There is also discussion about importing and pre-populating data
into nodes in ver flexible ways in general here
http://groups.drupal.org/node/8938 inspired by "dabble db" functionality.

The above could also be interesting for presentations. You could import
presentation data use the outliner ("book") module to create a web
chronology. Or, you could import slides as some form of co-editable image
(like SVG) and then present a slideshow using
http://drupal.org/project/thickbox.

But beyond all of that, if there were useful and realistic gateways between
open source software desktop applications and Drupal, that would be awesome.
I am thinking here about what would generally be desired for web
presentation, and web-based working with text, images, data, and what would
generally be desired when for instance a body of text is exported out of a
Drupal node and into a desktop software program like Open Office writer, or
Scribus. Basically, a lot of the formatting could be stripped out for the
web. And, a user could have some importer for OO or Scribus, that allowed
them to select several nodes, and import them into the desktop application.
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