From: Kirkland, Mike # IHTUL (mike.kirkland@ndchealth.com)
Date: Thu May 30 2002 - 19:19:32 EDT
Thanks to all who replied :)!, Greg Freemyer, Charles Ballowe, Robert
Mulley, Glenn Harrison, Mandell Degerness and Mathew Butler.
My original question and their replies are below:
Hi everyone,
I know there is a simple way of formating data on unix so excel can
use/import it in.
I want to do some system monitoring and produce some graphs, but forgot how
it could be done.
Thanks,
Greg:
.csv files
i.e. Comma Separated Values
Charles:
comma delimited or tab delimited text files can be imported into excel,
but there's graphing packages out there that can be used on unix.
gnuplot is a popular one. I've been known to just write perl + libgd
code to draw what I needed. Once code like that is written, your daily
cron job can just spit the graphs out to a web page without ever having
to go through a MS box and it becomes a largely hands off task.
(The windows people here are constantly handing me Excel files with data
that they expect me to use in a script or something leaving me to do the
format conversion before anything can be done. windows is evil, but i'll
spare you that rant.)
-charlie
Robert:
I don't believe there is anyway to save data in excel format. However, if
you just save the data tab delimited or as a comma seperated file, then
excel will have no problems importing it. Just recently I used tab
delimiting and saved the file as .xls which when opened by excel it
automatically imported it into the correct columns/rows.
Glenn:
Typically, you would export the data from your unix app in csv (comma
separated values) format. Excel can import this. You can also use
tab-delimited and a few others, but csv is the most common.
Mandell:
The way I do it is to format the data as a CSV (comma separated variable)
file.
Once I have created the file, I e-mail it to myself with the command:
uuencode mydata.csv mydata.csv | Mail -s "MyData File"
Mandell.Degerness@gems2.gov.bc.ca
Mathew:
Just put your UNIX data in comma separated value format (.CSV).
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