Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

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As someone with some potential admin work coming up, can anyone recommend some good cli tools for office work? I'd love to be able to take a word/libreoffice template and generate a document by supplying command line parameters for example.

> In fact, we can already see the impact of smartphone-only students on their ability to grasp and automate complex workflows. The fact that mobile apps are largely non-composable and non-programmable seems to seriously limit students' abilities in general digital problem solving.

Computers became so easy to use that no one learns how to use them. It's no wonder grandma always opens that attachment with an exe extension, file extensions have been hidden for as long as she's used computers, she doesn't know what the convey.

Teaching kids to code is the latest fad but I think the majority of them would be much better served learning some basic bash scripting and related unix tools.

> I'd love to be able to take a word/libreoffice template and generate a document by supplying command line parameters for example.

Python with PyWin32 is great for this, the Word doc part anyway. I've got several scripts the create modify or read Excel and Word docs for a number of different purposes: tracking my mileage, automating creation of new users (now done with Powershell though), converting and uploading documents to a web server. VBA/VBScript can do some of these things too, but Python is a much more capable and sane language to use. Powershell is another great automation choice too.

Pandoc can generate and convert between various document types, including Office docs based on a template (although I haven't used the option myself, I just convert Markdown to PDF/HTML most of the time).

You use a scripting language - most languages have somewhat usable libraries for manipulating e.g. MS Office documents directly, not through the Office applications.

Visual Basic for Applications. The Red programming language.

Is VBA good from the command line? I did a course on it ~10 years ago but it was always used from within applications.

Yes, you can run VBA from VBScript, Perl, etc. Basically any scripting language that can instantiate ActiveX VBA automation.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2050505/way-to-run-excel-...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27613878/list-of-perl-com...

python-docx allows you to generate Word files even on non-Windows platforms. Word 2016 says something about "converting" when it opens them, but they look OK. Apparently it will also let you modify them.

Someone else spoke about Python for Windows. That I have used with Excel but not Word. I imagine it would work pretty well, though.

Generate the documents in LaTeX?

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