Re: xls export function

["W. Haslbeck" <spam(dot)langweilt(at)gmx(dot)de>]

Hi,

> It's unlikely that we'll add xls capabilities as it's a proprietary
> format used on just one of the platforms we support - plus no one else
> has asked for it until today! I'm more interested in fixing the CSV
> issue you've run into.

XLS (or Excel XML) output would really be a big benefit (at least for me).
The big problem for me with CSV is that it can't describe datatypes. So
you have to options: a) let excel guess the datatype, which is often
wrong or b) set the datatype explicit at every CSV import for every
column. When you do a LOT data migration (which is a part of my job at
the moment, we're moving to SAP..) this can be very annoying.
To prevent that excel uses a wrong datatype, I don't use CSV export in
PgAdmin at all.
I create a view for each dataset that has to be exported and load the
view with the PostgreSQL ODBC driver to excel. Not very comfortable, but
at least not as error-prone as CSV import.

Creating an excel compatible XML output to PgAdmin shoudn't be to hard,
I've done this before for other tools. I really like to implement this
feature in PgAdmin, but no time atm.
Creating an "real" XLS is probably a bit harder than XML (but in doubt
you can always peek in e.g. perl's great Spreadsheet::WriteExcel module).

Walter