Viewworkbook

view spreadsheet files in a terminal window

SYNOPSIS

viewworkbook <spreadsheet>

DESCRIPTION

Viewworkbook lets you read spreadsheet-files in text-mode, in a terminal window. It reproduces the tables which are contained in a spreadsheet file and lets you navigate through the sheets. The visible part of a sheet is limited laterally and horizontally by the terminal-size but can be scrolled. You can adapt the width of table-columns, to render the table more readable and finally, if you wish, save tables to a text-file. To the author of the program, the utility serves to take a quick glance at spreadsheets that are received via email, in the Mutt mail-client, which is itself a terminal application.

The supported spreadsheet formats are those which are handled by the Ruby-gem "roo" (February 2017):

Microsoft™'s xls and xlsx,
the OpenDocument spreadsheet ods
and the SoftMaker™ spreadsheet formats pmd and pmdx.

Options

Other than the path to the spreadsheet file, viewworkbook does currently not interpret any command line arguments.

A list of commands and their associated hotkeys (in parenthesis) is shown below the current table:


11	12.2	July	34000	5%	prior	1957	true
12	2.33	July	1234	12.2%	prior	1966	true
13	50.0	August	334566	12%	in	1966	false
	A	B	C	D	E	F	G

*value (v) * save to file (f) * sheet (s) * column (c) * up(i) * down(k) * left(j) * right(l) * quit (q) **

When you enter one of the hotkeys, a command can be executed directly (like "q" to terminate the program), a sub-menu may be shown (like with "c" which shall give you control on column properties) or you are confronted with an input invitation (like with "v", where you have to enter a cell-reference). Read on for an explanation of each menu command.

value (v) display the value from a cell. This is useful, when columns are not wide nough to show complete values. After entering "v", you are immediately invited to enter a cell reference. Cells are referenced in the format "Column:Row", e.g. D:12 for the cell in column "D" and row "12".
save to file (f) Save the current or all tables to a text file. The command does initially show two alternative sub-commands:
Current sheet (c) * all sheets (a) Independently of your choice, in the next step you will have to enter the path to the output file. You will be warned, if the file already exists and may choose to either overwrite the existing file or name a different one.
sheet (s) Navigate to a different sheet in the current workbook. You may choose between a sheet-number and the name of a sheet. If you want to indicate the next sheet by name, the list of all available names is first shown. You just type right away the one that you want.
column (c) Alter the properties of the table-columns. At the time of this writing (February 2017) the only property that can be changed, is the width of all columns. When you enter "c" the subcommand column width (w) is shown. After entering "w" you can enter the desired width in characters.
Arrows(i, j, k, l) Navigate in a sheet that is too big to be displayed entirely at once. These hotkeys correspond to the default navigation keys in the vi editor.
quit (q) Enter "q" to quit the program at any moment except when an input invitation is shown.

There is currently only one such command available: The Escape-key will interrupt an unfinished action and refresh the display.

Other Information

Development and source code

Viewworkbook has been written in Ruby. As Ruby is an interpreted programming language, the executable file and all those that it may refer to at one point in time, are themselves the source-files of the current program-version. You can open them in any text-editor to scrutinize the source-code. If you have received the program as a Ruby-gem, you can also decompress a copy of the gem-file with tar -x, then tar -xzf.

Bugs

Negative values are not always displayed, when very long (like 15 ciphers). Enlarging the column-width further does not have an effect.

License

Viewworkbook is distributed under the conditions of the WTFPL-2 or later version; see https://wtfpl2.com for details.

Author

Viewworkbook has been developed by Michael Uplawski [email protected]