So, long story short, I want to automate the process of creating Word Documents. Looking for lang/module/lib which allows you to work with .doc and .xlsx files and generate .doc file with xlsx tables inside.
I thought I'll find something similar to xlsxwriter for DOC-files but couldn't find anything.
Feel free to suggest any options!
Related
Our current system database system is a clipper DOS application. The database inside its folder is fragmented/divided into many parts. I want to decrypt the database so that I will have only one database in all and avoid reshuffling of data. I'll attached the file folder Screenshot.. the database is on .DBF format
VScreenshot of files
Often you can decompile the CLIPPER exe file to source code and work from the .prg I've done it many times. The program to use is called WALKYRIE.
In Clipper and Fox Pro for DOS .dbf file is a simple table file.
If You want to use as data base with many tables in one unit.
You can import these tables in MS SQL data base and/or part of a MS Access database.
I see that you got several answers. Most are partially right. Let's address these one at a time:
All those files essentially comprise the "database" for the application you're using. They could be used by other applications as well. Besides having a lot of files, what is the problem you're trying to solve?
People mentioned indexes. You can generally ignore these. There are there primarily to make access to the data files faster. Any properly written clipper application will recreate these if they're missing or corrupted. You could test this by renaming one, running the app, and seeing what happens. If it doesn't recreate it you can name it back. Not replacing missing index files would be unusual behavior.
The DBF file format is binary, but barely. Most of what's in a DBF is text and is readable with an editor. But there's no reason to do so - I'm sure there are several free DBF utilities out there to to read DBF files. Getting the structure of the files could be very helpful.
Getting the data out of the files would also be fairly simple with a utility. If you look up the DBF format you could even write one fairly easily in Clipper, any other language that uses DBF files, or in something like Python. Any language that can open and write files, really. It's not hard - any competent developer could do this in a matter of hours. Must less if you're using Clipper or another language that natively reads DBX files.
Most people create dBase/Clipper programs with relational data, like SQL Server. Where SQL Server has tables that relate to each other dBase/Clipper has a file for each "table." This isn't a requirement, but it was almost certainly done this way.
Given that, if you get the table structures through a utility or by reading the headers in an editor (don't save them from an editor!) you could quite likely recreate the database schema (i.e. the map of the data). Once you have that it's fairly trivial to get the data into another type of database (SQL Sever, Access, or whatever you like to use.) If non of the files are too large it's conceivable to put all the files into Excel sheets. It really depends on what you want to do with it.
As others have said, you may be able to get the code by Valkyrie. Some people have used it very successfully. I don't know where you get it and I've never used it. Why do you not have the code? If this is a commercial application you likely should not have it. If it's a custom app who ever wrote it or paid to have it written should have the code.
Again, it's not clear to me what problem you're trying to solve. But there are many options for doing something with those DBF files. Fortunately they are one of the easier to read data formats you could be working with.
Let me know if you have any questions. Apologies for the typos that are no doubt scattered throughout this reply.
You sort of can get an idea of how they relate to each other by opening the index files they use (.NTX files). If you have the DBU utility (executable) around, you can open the DBF and load the index (NTX). LibreOffice Calc is also able to open DBFs (haven't tested .NTX).
If you open the .NTX on a text editor you will see the indexes in the beginning.
I open with Access, but I can save the data using a PrintFill Program.
I get 15+ PDF's a day that I have to enter into a database. They are generated from a table where the "Blanks" are filled in from specific table fields. Any tools or python code examples I could use to try and develop a means of extracting the data from the PDF to either write to or create a table to import to the database table? The Database is currently Access mdb.
Thanks
There are a number of approaches that will work.
One simple approach is to simply print the PDF file out to a text file and then have Access import that text. All recent versions of windows allow you to install a “text” printer that outputs the printing of a document to a text file. You can have access “process” a folder of pdfs, print them to text and then import those text files. You might need some VBA to remove “pages” and some extra lines before you import the data into Access.
Another approach is to use Word (Automate from Access) to open a PDF. When word opens a pdf, it converts it to a word document. This approach will even format rows as a word table. You can then pluck out that table data and send that data to word. You can likely pull that text out without writing the data out to a text file – or just use Words “save-as” to a text file (you can automate this process from Access).
Another approach is to use the free Ghost Script library that can extract text from a PDF (this I would consider if did not have word at your disposal).
So which solution is best will much depend on the current software you going to have installed on the computer running Access. Opening the pdf files with word would be my first choice and test.
At my old job we used Cogniview which converted PDF to Excel spreadsheets quite quickly. If you want to use Python, a quick search yielded me this which seems straight forward enough, PDF to XLS with Python
Before I begin, I would like to express my appreciation for all of the insight I've gained on stackoverflow and everyone who contributes. I have a general question about managing large numbers of files. I'm trying to determine my options, if any. Here it goes.
Currently, I have a large number of files and I'm on Windows 7. What I've been doing is categorizing the files by copying them into folders based on what needs to be processed together. So, I have one set that contains the files by date (for long term storage) and another that contains the copies by category (for processing and calculations). Of course this doubles my data each time. Now I'm having to create more than one set of categories; 3 copies to be exact. This is quadrupling my data.
For the processing side of things, the data ends up in excel. Originally, all the data was brough into excel. Then all organization and filtering was performed in excel. This was time consuming and not easily maintainable over the long term. Later the work load was shifted to the file system itself, which lightened the work in excel.
The long and short of it is that this is an extremely inefficient use of disk space. What would be a better way of handling this?
Things that have come to mind:
Overlapping Folders
Is there a way to create a folder that only holds the addresses of a file, rather than copying the file. This way I could have two folders reference the same file.
To my understanding, a folder is a file listing the memory addresses of the files inside of it, but on Windows a file can only be contained in one folder.
Microsoft SQL Server
Not sure what could be done here.
Symbolic Links
I'm not an administrator, so I cannot execute the mklink command.
Also, I'm uncertain about any performance issues with this.
A Junction
Apparently not allowed for individual files, only folders in windows.
Search folders (*.search-ms)
Maybe I'm missing something, but to my knowledge there is no way to specify individual files to be listed.
Hashing the files
Creating hash tags for all the files, would allow for the files to be stored once. But then I have no idea how I would handle the hash tags.
XML
Maybe I could use xml files to attach meta data to the files and somehow search using them.
Database File System
I recently came across this concept in my search. Not sure how it would apply Windows.
I have found a partial solution. First, I discovered that the laptop I'm using is actually logged in as Administrator. As an alternative to options 3 and 4, I have decided to use hard-links, which are part of the NTFS file system. However, due to the large number of files, this is unmanageable using the following command from an elevated command prompt:
mklink /h <source\file> <target\file>
Luckily, Hermann Schinagl has created the Link Shell Extension application for Windows Explorer and a very insightful reading of how Junctions, Symbolic Links, and Hard Links work. The only reason that this is currently a partial solution, is due to a separate problem with Windows Explorer, which I intend to post as a separate question. Thank you Hermann.
I was wondering if there was a way to get the author and title properties of word, power point and excel documents.
I want to run this on various computers so i don't really want to have to install libs on each one (so i thought running a batch file would be best.
Thanks
See this previous question: Getting file properties using a batch file
Working on a school project, the program is supposed to read from a text file that has a record about a song in every line, fields separated by ";".
Anyways I have no knowledge of databases, and I just want the quickest way to create a database from that text file, and also i will need to change some of the fields of the records once in a while from the program... Also the program needs to search through the database based on certain fields.
Anyways so far all our projects didn't keep a database, so when we closed the program, every info was gone, now i actually need to keep some info for the next time the program runs. What's the fastest way to accomplish this?
Also I wanna be able to keep some info about the software, like the path of the original text file for weekly updates. Where can i save info like that?
EDIT: it doesn't have to an actual database, as long as i can search and edit it efficiently.
If you can use SQL database, I'd suggest simple file-based database SQLite
With SQLite, you can query, insert and update records by executing regular SQL statements.
Here you will find introduction to C++ interface It's easy to embed SQLite support in an application because SQLite comes as a library, meaning a bunch of header files and 1-2 binary archive with library.
Your comma-delimited textfile is aleady a database. You can add records, delete records, and modify records using the standard textfile routines provided by the standard C++ libraries.
Alternatively, you can import your textfile into SQL Server using BULK INSERT.
Finally, you can access your CSV (comma-delimited text) file using SQL queries. You need to find the correct connection string. See http://www.connectionstrings.com/textfile.