At work we have a bunch of web pages that display information in tabular format. I have a project that needs to track a bunch of changes to the data in the database displayed in web pages in tabular format. I manage projects in Excel because MS Project is impossibly complex for the average person and Project X isn’t ready yet.
(When it ships, Project X will rock – it uses ObjectiveCLIPS which means it will be easy to hack its behavior and, more importantly, will act logically in the first place. But I digress)
Anyhow, I need to update my spreadsheet copy of this tabular data from the web page every week to make status reports. It seems to me that the sensible thing would be for html tables I select and copy to be put onto the clipboard in some format that Excel understands means TABLE. That would be the sensible thing. Which is likely why it doesn’t happen. Pasting a copied HTML table into Excel results in all the text being concatenated into a single field as one long string. What idiot thought that was the right thing to do? So much for application integration. They own the entire thing and they can’t make it work sensibly.
Instead, I had to rely on Squeak and the HTML parser I built to do http://www.badpage.info’s validator to extract the data into a tabular format (I used an array of dictionaries) that I could then use to output a csv file (comma separated values) that Excel will recognize.
Which resulted in me writing an entire app in Seaside and pitching Excel altogether. I mean, if I’ve got to write code anyhow, hey.
I do think this is one of those tasks that DabbleDB was made for. Pity its not out yet.