Celestia Forums

Hey Chris I was wondering if you could add xls, cvs (spread sheet) support to Celestia. Here is my reasoning. I currently have created my system in M$ Excel. But I don’t realy want to spend the time porting all the numbers over to the ssc format.

The way it would work is somewhat simple.

On the First Row, there would be Defining tags. Something to the affect of <CelestiaTag> Where CelestiaTag equals any current tag currently used in Celestia ssc files.

What this does is define which columns contain valid information. All columns that are not tagged are ignored.

Next for the row, there should be a simple defining tag again that tells which rows contain valid information. Again any rows that do not have this tag are ignored. This simple intersection of the Rows and Columns makes it very easy to develop systems. Plus the added values of having formulas within the spread sheet make its very attractive.

So what do you think?

Hi,

Just use one of the many csv import filters that exist for the wonderful open source, easy to learn MySQL database and then use the MySQL add-on. Much more powerful and you get everything you want. You can make the csv's from Excel if you wish.

(By the way, csv stands for "comma separated variables" or "comma separated values". You could easily produce such lists by hand or as output from another program -- nothing specific about Excel here.)

As for the format of your suggested tags, looks like you are trying to do XML the hard way. An XML-formatted tag schema would be perfectly possible, but why not try it the simple way first. Working with the MySQL add-on, you can use any of a number of cheap or free tools to do direct spreadsheet-style entry of the variables of interest, if doing this via a programming interface seems otherwise too hard or forbidding. No need to introduce another layer into the equation, and you get to take advantage of all the work already done and interact with a real database!

Last time i checked system level detail was not supported by the mySQL database. I do agree that MySQL is way to go. As for the cvs, xls. i just uses these for there math functions (rand), if there were a simple way to just import the information it would be cool. thats all that i am implying with the post.