I’m writing some (Ruby) scripts to help my sister (a biologist) process and analyze some of her field data, and I keep running into spreadsheet programs that are too damn smart for our own good. She, like many/most non-programmer types, uses spreadsheet programs to organize and rearrange her data. Problem is that Excel keeps deciding knows better than we do what kind of data we have, and how it should be formatted. I can’t tell you how much time we’ve lost because it decides to rewrite dates and times in ways that break my script, not to mention inserting wacko header info, changing the line break characters, and deciding that animal tag labels are numbers in scientific notation. And, sadly, OpenOffice tends to play similar games, although the details are different.
With sufficient effort we can no doubt beat Excel and its friends into doing what we want, but I’m tired of this and would much rather have a tool that doesn’t fight us all the time. Does anyone out there know of a spreadsheet like program that’s more of a text editor and less like a word processor? I’d preferably like something simple, open source, and easy to use so I can sell it to my sister and (perhaps more importantly) she can sell it to her co-workers/co-authors as an alternative to a highly entrenched status quo. I’d like it to by default treat cell contents as basic text, and not race around interpreting and reinterpreting the data.
Anyone know of such a thing? Please? Whimper?
Also, sorry for the silence around here. In three weeks we move to the UK for a year and there’s rather a crap load of stuff that needs to be done. Doesn’t help that some bored stupid punk wanna-be hackers (no, really, I’m not pissed) have hacked our Computer Science lab at the U for the second time in a month. Damn, but that stuff ticks me off. Not like I could be getting any real work done instead of chasing these script kiddies around.
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