OpenXTalk Forums

So, to the latest offering from LiveCode showing that they want to tie their customers to other commercial software:
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https://livecode.com/xlsx-lib-a-bonus-l ... dle-offer/

Quite apart from the fact that I feel that if a programming language is "that good" it should not require users to shell out
more money beyond the initial fee to gain other capabilities, what this actually does do is bind users to MicroSoft Office.

Personally I have never seen what is so compelling about MicroSoft Office that I should either pay for it or steal it when
LibreOffice, OpenOffice (and so on) are interoperable with MicroSoft Office and cost nothing.

LiveCode is [as, presumably OpenXTalk will be] perfectly capable of importing tab-delimited csv files into table fields, and, similarly,
exporting the same for import into LibreCalc Spreadsheets, all the other Free and/or Open Source equivalents, and MicroSoft Excel
for further processing.

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Certainly OpenXTalk does NOT want to go dwn this sort of path.

It is also capable of importing data and styles from existing xlsx files. Are you excited yet?

What on earth is wrong with people that they might possibly get excited about something like that?

Most business software development these days isn't creating systems from scratch as much as integrating existing systems.

Regardless how much you or I personally prefer LibreOffice, Microsoft Excel is the leading spreadsheet by far.

Market relevance isn't achieved by dictating the scope of apps businesses use, but accommodating whatever they use.

This posting was really a question about OpenXTalk that was set off by
LiveCode's marketting: as OpenXTalk is NOT meant to be a business
setup it should NOT tie itself to other commercial software packages.

richmond62 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 28, 2022 6:30 pm This posting was really a question about OpenXTalk that was set off by
LiveCode's marketting: as OpenXTalk is NOT meant to be a business
setup it should NOT tie itself to other commercial software packages.

I'm not going to 'tie' OpenXTalk to anything commercial, in any way, if I can avoid it.
However I don't see adding a library that reads/writes files from a commercial product such as MicroSloth Axel as 'tying' to that product. Your example of LibreOffice can do exactly that. In fact having import read/export write capabilities seems like an essential thing for being able to break away from a proprietary system.

As you may know I've historically never been a fan of MS Office (or any other of MS products, not even XBox!) and in fact have avoided that like a plaque. About 10 years ago I used Excel a lot, but mostly only for exporting to csv to use outside of MS Office (for variable data printing). Sometimes clients would send in pages in MS Word or MS Publisher (which is basically a Aldus PageMaker 1.x clone, JUST DON'T USE IT!!!) which we would just export to PS/PDF for use in a real page layout program (mostly Adobe InDesign). That was a small company so our dept. shared a single MS Office license, and I occasionally use LibreOffice instead if a coworker was already using MS Office.

I do believe there is already an (older) open source xTalk Excel library around ( on GitHub somewhere, if I can find it again...)

I remember xTalk was pretty darn good at doing things with those exported CSV, reasonably fast. For example I had a script that generated #000000 sort of number lists in ranges (for instance #008000 down to #007500) to make/merge with CSV for use in generating raffle tickets with VDP PDF so they print in reversed number order across a sheet and down through a stack of sheets on a HP Digital Press.

A lot of graphics places I've been at seem to prefer FileMakerPro/Server as their Database of choice, my guess it's that's due to it's macOS heritage.

I agree, when I hear the words "spreadsheets" or "databases" what comes to mind is "tedious work", which is not at all exciting to me in anyway.

A lot of graphics places I've been at seem to prefer FileMakerPro/Server as their Database of choice

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That 8 makes me wonder.
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Extremely expensive:

https://filemaker.livecode.com/livecode ... and-trial/

Excel, Excel, Excel:

https://www.aslugontheroad.com/ourprodu ... r-livecode
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The only snag seems to be that there is no obvious way to download the Open Source version.

Aha:

https://www.aslugontheroad.com/download ... en-sources