[LON-CAPA-dev] New Perl Module

[Matthew Brian Hall]

Hey folks.

I nearly have things set up where the instructor could hit a button and
get a CSV formatted version of all the student spreadsheets (each student
sheet would be munged into a single row).

The problem is excel does not bother with columns in the csv file after the
255th.  So I found Spreadsheet::WriteExcel:

 Spreadsheet::WriteExcel is a Perl module which can be used to create native
Excel binary files. Formatted text and numbers can be written to multiple
worksheets in a workbook. Formulas and functions are also supported. It is 100%
Perl and doesn't require any Windows libraries or a copy of Excel. Neither does
it require Windows. It will also work on the majority of UNIX and Macintosh
platforms. Generated files are compatible with Excel 5, 95, 97 and 2000 and
with the Linux/UNIX spreadsheet applications OpenOffice and Gnumeric.

I'm going to investigate this a little further.  It also appears to allow
multiple sheets inside a spreadsheet, which is another way of dealing with the
mass of data we have.

I thought I'd bring this up for comment before adding a new *.pm to our
required list.

Matthew

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Matthew Hall           LON-CAPA developer         hallmat3@msu.edu
123 North Kedzie Hall                    Michigan State University
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