Sending data to Excel

annekecr

in Contributed Library Questions • 2 years ago

Hi there!

Does anyone know if it is possible to send data from Processing to Excel? I might be able to do this through a text file, but was hoping someone might have done this before straight through Processing.

Any advice or thoughts would be appreciated!
:)

Replies(4)

PhiLho

Re: Sending data to Excel

2 years ago

In which language? Since you post in Processing Implementations, I suppose you want to use an alternative to regular Processing, but if you don't indicate which one, we cannot guess.

For JVM-based language, there is a library to connect to Excel, but from the description, it is used only to read from Excel files.
Another solution might be to use some Com library to communicate with a live instance of Excel.

zen.webb

Re: Sending data to Excel

2 years ago

What kind of data? Just text, or do you want to send images, styling or other stuff too?

If you just want text, just generate a .csv file (comma separated values) using PrintWriter. Separate each column of data with commas, and put each row on its own row in the file. Then just open that .csv file in Excel, it'll do all the importing / interpreting work for you!

Now if you want send more complicated stuff, you might get lucky and find some sort of API, but Microsoft hasn't been to keen on making APIs available for their business products, so I don't know about that. You could try taking a look at a program called AutoHotKey - it is used to generate keystrokes and do general OS-level scripting on PCs, and there might be some functionality in there you can use to automate the process (taking screen shots of a sketch, swapping windows, pasting, clicking all the things you would click yourself, etc).

annekecr

Re: Sending data to Excel

2 years ago

Wow thanks so much for the quick reply!

I'm using Processing and using the frameworks of a sketch found here http://blog.blprnt.com/page/3. But all this allows you to do is GET data FROM a spreadsheet and doesnt actually allow you to WRITE to it.

All I want is to send text at this stage.. but hopefully later on some images, etc.. (basically Im trying to creat an intelligent database, thats continuously learning / adding to the database) :P

The PrintWriter objects looks like it could do the trick for text at this stage! :D And I'll have a look into your other suggestions!

Thanks for the help! ^_^

PhiLho

Re: Sending data to Excel

2 years ago

" I'm using Processing"
Wrong section then, I move to a more appropriate section.

" Im trying to creat an intelligent database"
Not sure about the intelligence, but you will have probably much more success by using a real database...