Re: Automated Unattended Convert spoolfile to Excel and emailed as an attachement

FWIW: Monarch may indeed do what you want.

Beware, however, that you may find it hard to control once it gets a foothold. My last company used Monarch like crazy, much to the distress of the VP for IT. Monthly reports were created as PDFs and the Accounting Dept went quite mad sucking them into Excel--they had their own mini IT dept. The VP's issue was that the CEO blamed him when Accounting occasionally messed up and produced an erroneous spreadsheet. But, by and large, he lost the battle.

Sam

On 2/11/2015 4:17 PM, Buck Calabro wrote:

Coming to the point, decades ago, I used a product called Monarch. It
runs on the PC. You provide a template and it uses that template to
suss out what the detail lines are and extract them to a spreadsheet.
It turns out that Datawatch (the makers of Monarch) are still in
business, and their successor product seems like it might be able to
extract a spreadsheet from a report (among its many other bells and
whistles.) http://www.datawatch.com/products/datawatch-modeler/

I last used this more than 25 years ago so I know exactly zero about the
current capabilities. They have a free trial - what's to lose?

The reason I don't use a product like that is because we don't have any
3rd party software where I want to extract data from a report. If
someone wants an in-house report as a spreadsheet, I've been using Scott
Klement's POI wrappers. I've dabbled with Python for my own ad hoc work
and it's quite nice. Haven't tried to lever it into production yet for
fear of my colleagues lynching me for Yet Another Thing To Learn And
Maintain.

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