To make the scripting language compatible you have to copy the internals of the other programme as well.
To open ordinary spreadsheet files you only have to copy the 'surface' of the other spreadsheet. The team at Microsoft were determined not to let anyone steal the crown from them – and Visual Basic was the mechanism they settled on. Microsoft won the spreadsheet market from Lotus-1-2-3 by ensuring the Excel could open 1-2-3 files and do everything 1-2-3 could do. The big compatibility challenge to LibreOffice is macros and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) – which is hardly surprising if you know the history of Excel.
If you copy a dBASE sheet, include the top row that contains the header data. You can enter a range reference like A1:X500 in the Name Box if you don't want to scroll. You can open a *.dbf dBASE file or many other file types. Open the Calc file that contains the data to be imported to Base. Open a Base file of the database type that you want.Įither create a new Base file using the Database Wizard, or open any existing Base file that is not read-only. If a field in the first valid data row contains a number, the whole column is set to number format, and only numbers, no text, will be shown in that column.
For example, to ensure the first column has a text format, you must make sure that the first field of the first valid data row contains text.