Wednesday, June 30, 2010

sc - command line spreadsheet

No surprise to folks who read my blog, I really dig on command line apps.  Well, after another visit to my favorite web based list for cli apps (thanks Jared Lee) and started to play with sc (available even in Lucid 10.04 repos).  This app is for command line spreadsheets.

Command line spreadsheets, well, yes.  I actually have a few use cases where a sqlite database would be way over the top but there is some math I would prefer not to do by hand.  That's what spreadsheets are good for.  sc comes to the rescue.

While I'll confess there is no easy import/export via csv or some other stuff, it is very versatile and does offer a text export which calculates the formulas and shows the layout as if you were using the app.  Let me show you a few quick shots.

First, using the app:


















Second,  the format of the file while being used by sc, bear in mind this is also clear text:

















Lastly, this is what the text export of the same document looks like:













I hope this might give you some ideas on how to use this quick, simple and easy to use program in your personal workflow.

--
CafeNinja
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2 comments:

Scott said...

In my first job I used command line lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet on a nice green & black terminal

Anonymous said...

Turns out that gnumeric will read an sc formatted spreadsheet, from whence you can export it anywhere.