Customized .xls workbook - buttons don't perform

knutkja

Hi,

I've got a question regarding a Excel document which is used for applying for grants in the movie and television industry. The file is customized with buttons to expand/collapse budget posts that are not filled in, among other things - this works in Excel (ver. X) but not in NeoOffice/J.

Is there a way to work around this? The Excel-file is found at http://www.filmfondet.no/Server/Components/Global/ImageStream.aspx?DocId=121

(More specifically; under the tab "Kalkyle" the spreadsheet has a customized header with buttons to perform different operations. I cannot make them work.)

Thanks,
knutkja

Luke · Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2005 6:25 am Post subject:

Hi,
The spreadsheet you linked to contains macros. Microsoft office macros do not work in OOo, and probably never will. Appart from the techincal difficulty of implementing macro translation, I think Microsoft's assorted copyrights (and patents?) on the macro language prevent anyone attempting it. Sadly, there is no alternative to excel for this, unless you want to try working out what the macros do and reimplementing them as OOo macros.

Luke

sardisson · Town Crier Joined: Feb 01, 2004 Posts: 4588

Actually, there is a new (couple of months old) project in OOo to get MS macros/VBAScript or whatever it's called working in future versions of OOo. Obviously it won't help Knut now, though Sad

I can't find the announcement right now, but you can pick up snippets from this blog.

Smokey

knutkja · Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2005 3:02 pm Post subject:

Thanks for your replies. It's not a good situation when public institutions (like the Norwegian Film Fund in this case) uses Excel files stuffed with macros, and therefore forces its applicants to use Ms Office.

(Hopefully our newly elected government coalition over here will make some changes... open source was mentioned as one of the political issues in the campain, but not a major one though... Smile

)

K

OPENSTEP · Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2005 7:12 pm Post subject:

If you're really desperate to use OOo, you might want to look into the new StarOffice "Enterprise" release. I seem to remember reading in a Sun press release that it came with a tool for migrating VB. I may be wrong (I may be thinking about that tool to assess document compatibility). But I don't think it's going to be shipping with OOo.

ed