The Lotus Spreadsheet should open/save as a WK1 format. The other day I had some XLS data that I wanted to import into a NSF and was shocked to find that the spreadsheet inside the Notes client couldn't generate a file that could be imported.

Either add the option to import odf/excel spreadsheets, or at least add the option to save spreadsheets in 1-2-3 format from the spreadsheet program that's integrated with R8.

There are some good (and free) tools for importing excel files into Notes. I blogged about them recently: { Link }

@kevin, I think you've missed the point, The native export for WKS is very fast and pretty good. Except... Lotus WKS format does not work in current business applications (since Excel started concidering it a security risk)

I've written one exporter after another, but, any agent based solution is going to be slower than a native feature. The custom stuff is great when you need formatting, or "pretty" is important, but, for quick and dirty the old way WAS great.

@Dwight - I agree native is better. I just wanted folks to know about some of the *import* tools out there, which seem far less well-known than the myriad of *export* ones.

*.xls is a propietary non-standard format. The documentation of this format is not publically available. No way it is worthy to spend a minute on this old and odd format.

Let's concentrate our efforts in an excellent compatibility with the standard ISO OpenDocument format (ISO/IEC 26300).

I don't really care what the export format is as long as
1. It has a "tabular" format
2. Can handle categorized column and wrapped / truncated text
3. Can export data that is not "displayed" in the view

CSV can handle 2 but not 3, Tabular Text cannot handle 2 and 3, Structure Text failed on 1 so I am stumped.

@7, I think 1 & 3 in your list are mutually exclusive in the general case.

I think native xls and ods export / import support would be excellent. This of course gets political and I think the question of how worth the effort it is could be debated. CSV export is fast and works - if you really need good export capabilities though you ought to look at the tools - the pricing is pretty competitive. I'll vote it up though.

I recently had this with a user who had alot of contacts in a spreadsheet and wanted them imported to his contacts view of his personal address book.

After a bit of research I was able to figure out how to do it, but explaining to the process to the user too quite a bit of time and patience. It would have been much easier if it would have worked with a simple excel file instead of the WK1 thing.


Incidentally, I hope everyone knows that they can select documents in a view and then select "Edit/Copy Selected as Table" and then paste that directly into an excel spreadsheet. It works really well and I use it all the time...not sure of any limits though.