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Month: November 2016

spreadsheet csv file reading issues and solutions

Published by jweisber on 2016-11-10

We imported a spreadsheet as csv but couldnt edit it in kate. It said “R/O” [=readonly]  Bruce helped us come up with several fixes:  (Thanks Bruce!)

  1. He installed  on Deneb and Canopus “libreoffice, including ‘calc’, which is an open implementation of Excel.  That’s a nice GUI way to edit .csv files.”    https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.2  .  You can launch from the Office menu or via the command line as ‘libreoffice –calc <filename> &’
  2. He found that the problem is that the carriage returns are the wrong format, by using the file command:
    file Summary_edited_JoelNov.csv

        Summary_edited_JoelNov.csv: ISO-8859 text, with very long lines, with CRLF line terminators

    He says that this indicates that the csv has dos-type CRLF, not unixtype.  So he installed dos2unix and ran:

    dos2unix < Summary_edited_JoelNov.csv > Summary_edited_JoelNov.unix.csv    and now
    file Summary_edited_JoelNov.unix.csv

    Summary_edited_JoelNov.unix.csv: ISO-8859 text, with very long lines  ,
    so it is fixed and editable with kate

  3. vim or vi work on the original, even with “bad” CRLF

–Joel