Krishnan's weblog – an assortment of things. A scribble pad. A hybrid microblog. Mostly bread crumbs of an internet journey.
For many years till yesterday, I knew about OpenOffice.Org Calc. Today, I’m excited about it.
I tried OpenOffice many years ago. It could do few things back then, but I immediately dismissed as inadequate for my needs. I have always been a fan of what VBA could do for Excel.
Last week, I completed the most complex piece of VBA application I’d ever written. I am a VBA newbie and it took me a week to finish my code that could be printed on 28 A4 pages. My spreadsheet till date works flawlessly on XP/Office 2003 like it is supposed to, but I wrote most of my code in Vista/Office 2007.
When I upgraded to Debian Squeeze, Openoffice.org 3.1.1 came with it. I checked out the new version and was impressed that one could write macros in Python, Javascript, BeanShell in addition to BASIC.
I tried to open my most complex piece of VBA code in Openoffice.org and I was bombarded with hundreds of repetitive error messages that I had to kill the spreadsheet from the command line. I was convinced that VBA and OOoCalc are not compatible, till I discovered this site by accident when trying to learn to write Javascript Macros in OOo.
OK. All I needed to add was “Option VBA Support 1″. That didn’t sound too difficult, so I tried opening my spreadsheet again and had to again kill everything from command line.
Some thing was not right and I wasn’t being able to run VBA despite the promised compatibility.
So I decided to go slow. No matter how many times, I couldn’t run the macros when I opened the native excel file. So I decided to open the excel file with macros disabled. That let me open the spreadsheet, but nothing was working. I found that OOoCalc automatically had added “Option VBA Support 1″ to my modules.
I saved the file as .ODS and proceeded to debug by enabling macros again. This time, errors didn’t come in a flood.They came one at a time and it was easier to debug.
The first set of errors related to variables which did not have an explicit Dim statement. VBA in Excel seemed more forgiving in handling varaibles without proper Dim statements. But OOo Calc didn’t like it. So I ended up adding a few Dim statements for some variables.
The next set of errors was with Excel UDF names. OOo Calc likes to see Functions being invoked with uppercase letters. So if you’d used lower case letters in Excel, they would show up as errors. This could be easily fixed by use of find and replace feature.
With just these two things, fixed my new .ODS file worked perfectly. I then saved it as .xls and re-opened the .xls and everything was still working. Though OOo Calc documentation still says that not all VBA features are supported, VBA runs well on OOoCalc for all practical engineering calculations. So now is the time for me to make the switch.
Now if you have difficulties, in getting your VBA code to work in OOo Calc, dont give up soon.
I upgraded the wp-hive plug-in to version 0.5 earlier today. It wasn’t an active plugin for me and I needn’t have upgraded it. But I did it earlier today and didn’t think twice about it.
Later, I found out that I could not login into Wordpress as an administrator. Everything else seemed to be working fine. Site was up and running as usual, but I couldn’t access my dashboard.
When I checked the Wordpress database through phpMyAdmin the wp_options table was perfect. I was soon able to figure out that this was not a Wordpress problem.
So I started troubleshooting by trying to undo my last set of actions, one of which was upgrading the wp-hive plugin. Renaming the wp-hive folder gave an serious error and brought the site down. With that I was able to narrow down the problem to the file
/wp-contents/db.php
I remmed out the line
/*require_once( WP_CONTENT_DIR . ‘/plugins/wp-hive/do-prefix.php’);
*/
Everything is back to normal for me now because I dont use wp-hive.
I didn’t find anything about this problem in Google, so I decided to write this down.
There is this beautiful portable suite called LiberKey which is really a collection of hundreds of open source applications for Windows.
For months, I have searched and tried out several portable applications for Windows. None of them even came close to LiberKey in terms of the range, stability and upgrades.
I’ve used LiberKey from the same USB device on both XP and Vista machines with equal ease. You can update LiberKey on XP machine and run it on Vista and viceversa. In fact, I’ve copied LiberKey onto my “C:\Program Files” on Windows drives and I enjoy free updates of all my open source applications.
What was a good Windows solution, has now proven to be a good Linux solution too.
Today, I tried out several LiberKey applications on Debian through the Wine interface and most of them seemed to be working well. The only fall back is that these applications dont work through the Liberkey interface. But rather each application needs to be run from its folder manually. This is not a set back as all it takes is a link to a application to open it.
Debian users sure wont have to miss their little windows programs on GNOME or KDE.
Learning Daily is a personal blog that is just as random as my thoughts. The navigation bar at the top and the search box may be the only things that will help you find something.
My present interests lie in sustainability, peak oil, debian, Web after 2.0, creativity and epistemology. I learn daily. I learn about everything under the sun and even those beyond it. I am a perpetual student whose believes that wisdom is the real reward for learning.