Open Office Calc Help needed!

[dishawjp]

Hi All,

My court clerk, a pure wonder with all things computer related has managed to hose Open Office Calc , the spreadsheet program. There are several years of court dockets stored there and restoring them manually would take months. I'm not sure how she managed to do this, but the contents of all the cells seem to be hidden. The data is there, and can be accessed, sort of, with Gnumeric. Also clicking on a cell will display its contents in the editing bar on the top of the program.

I think that the corruption got in since she will sometimes open the spreadsheets with Gnumeric, sometimes save them in .xls (Microsoft) format, or whatever format she happens to select at that particular moment.

I've Googels this with no luck yet. It's almost as if she's somehow protected or hidden the cells' contents, but she can't even give me a clue as to what she did or how.

Any help sincerely appreciated.

Thanks

[Void Main]

Do you have an example document that would not have sensitive information in it? I could take a look at it and see if my OOo will open it. I'm not an "office" expert by any stretch of the imagination. You do have backups right? :)

[dishawjp]

Thanks Void,

I'ld be more than happy to send you a file. What would be the best way to do that? The contents of any of them are a mixture of open (disposed) and somewhat confidential (pending) cases. I wouldn't want the contents to be available on the internet, but for this purpose, I would be willing to risk a possible breach of confidentiality. The contents are insufficient to positively identify a defendant (no SS# or DOB, or etc.) and out of this immediate area, would most likely be meaningless. Data include offense, arrest date, name, sentence, fine imposed, receipt #, and etc.

Backups... what are they for

Would I be able to send a PM with a file attachment?

Please let me know the best way to do this and I'll send a sample tomorrow.

[Void Main]

Check your private messages.

[dishawjp]

This gets weirder all the time. I brought a copy of one of the files home and ran it on my computer and it opened perfectly. So I figured that the problem had to be in the OpenOffice installed on my court computer. Simple!

# rpm -e openoffice.org
#apt-get install openoffice.org.

Same difference. So then I deleted the ~/.openoffice directory thinking that it might be corrupted somehow. Still no change. I tried to reinstall from my Fedora Core 1 CD's thinking that there might have been a version update that is creating difficulties, but now my CD seems to be acting up, so that option is out. It just hung on the:

#rpm -Uvh /mnt/cdrom/Fedora/RPMS/openoffice.org-1.1.0-5

command.

Also, Void, I checked my PM's tried your suggestion and sent you a PM back.

Thanks again

Jim

[dishawjp]

PROBLEM SOLVED!!! (sort of)

I also had to remove and then reinstall some .lib fils from my Fedora Core 1 disk 1 to correct the problem.

This is scary since it seems that there may have been an OpenOffice update that trashed my files. Either that or OpenOffice isn't as stable as I would have hoped when I converted all my court files to it. It makes me wonder if I should consider upgrading this computer when FC2 comes out next month. You can bet that I'll be doing some extensive testing on my home computer before I try that with this one.

The remaining difficulty is that now apt wants to update my openoffice files again

[root@lancelot root]# apt-get update
Get:1 http://ayo.freshrpms.net fedora/linux/1/i386 release [1991B]
Fetched 1991B in 1s (1509B/s)
Hit http://ayo.freshrpms.net fedora/linux/1/i386/core pkglist
Hit http://ayo.freshrpms.net fedora/linux/1/i386/core release
Hit http://ayo.freshrpms.net fedora/linux/1/i386/updates pkglist
Hit http://ayo.freshrpms.net fedora/linux/1/i386/updates release
Hit http://ayo.freshrpms.net fedora/linux/1/i386/freshrpms pkglist
Hit http://ayo.freshrpms.net fedora/linux/1/i386/freshrpms release
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
[root@lancelot root]# apt-get upgrade
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages will be upgraded
openoffice.org openoffice.org-i18n openoffice.org-libs
The following packages have been kept back
libdv libquicktime
3 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 removed and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 74.0MB/115MB of archives.
After unpacking 1462kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n
Abort.
[root@lancelot root]#

I remember a discussion on this list a while back about holding back specific updates and will now have to research that a bit to prevent updates from hosing me again. It is odd that these updates haven't been offered to me on my home computer that I know of. At least I don't recall them and have no problems with OOo on that machine.

The only line of my /etc/apt/sources.list active on my court computer is the following:

rpm http://ayo.freshrpms.net fedora/linux/1/i386 core updates freshrpms

I have several other repositories enabled on my home computers.

Any thoughts?

Jim Dishaw

[Void Main]

Yeah, sorry about not giving you a key piece of info in the PM, I sent the additional info back in another PM but it seems you have figured out the problem.

Yeah, a few things come to mind. As you mentioned there must be some sort of problem with the updated OpenOffice.org. Of course I've even seen the prorpietary stuff cause big problems on an update. Since OOo is the main function of this machine, I agree that you would want to do extensive testing before upgrading OOo. You have a good idea in excluding it in your apt.conf, I think this should do it in your "APT {" section:

Code: Select all

Hold { "^openoffice"; };


And my final thought. Backups, backups, backups! :)