Re: copy and paste

Tino Wildenhain wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Am Fr, den 24.09.2004 schrieb Richard Hayward um 1:18:
> 
>>A thing I have to do all the time, with MSSQL, is copy a recordset
>>from one of the query tools, and then paste it into another
>>application, typically a spreadsheet for analysis or specialized
>>formatting. 
> 
> 
> What about just *using* the data in the spreadsheet?
> You can use the datasource of postgres directly.

Very good idea.

> Works with OpenOffice and IIRC with Excel as well.
> 
> Analysis however should be done in the db if possible ;)

I agree. Combining it is even better, e.g. pivot tables in excel from 
database source.

Additionally, I'd like to point out that we *have* copy to clipboard in 
pgadmin3 1.2B1 (view data and query tool), despite the fact that there's 
no commonly accepted clipboard format that would make it really useful. 
Consequently, copying data from one app to another will always be 
non-trivial.

We had this discussion earlier, resulting in the todo item "Data 
import/export tool incl. transformation". To be really useful, such a 
tool must be not database system centric, but based on ODBC or similar, 
to be db independent and able to warp data between systems. This is 
clearly out of the pgadmin base tool's scope.
I don't know if there are good tools on the open source market for this, 
since I usually don't use tools like that. I wouldn't object hosting 
such a project and supplying the development backbone of The pgAdmin 
Development Group (architecture, i18n, packaging...), but somebody would 
need to show up to contribute quite a lot of work.


Regards,
Andreas