Sort data in LibreOffice Writer

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, 24 Feb 2022 at 13:20, Marco Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:
>
> the ODF processing techniques in the link I already shared would make it automatic though. Once one has written the right script, of course. Takes time all the same, but less boring, less error-prone.

I have never done macro scripting in LO.

I have done a lot of it in MS Office, in the 20th century, though, and
I did tech support for desktop users as my day job for 15 years or
more.

I have done things like:
 - extract data from a scanner on classic MacOS, run OCR on it, save
to MS Word documents, extract the text, and send it via Kermit to a
PDP-11 for further work in DECwrite on RSTS.
 - extract data from CP/M files kept on Acorn MOS DFS-format floppy
disks and convert it for use in MS-DOS.
 - extract word processor files from a dedicated hardware word
processor (using *hard-sectored* floppies, unreadable on PC drives)
and convert them to WordPerfect.

The last involved building a serial data capture cable, sniffing baud
rates, parity and stop bits by protocol analysis, then "printing" the
documents to a terminal program on a PC, capturing the files, and then
writing bespoke software to detect the first line, and in software,
reverse software-bidirectional-printing (i.e. finding every other line
and reversing the sequence of the characters, but only for *either*
odd-numbered *or* even-numbered lines).

So, what I am getting at is: non-trivial stuff.

For it to work, in my considered professional experience, the input
data has to be in a very specific format, and that format must be
carefully-defined and rigidly adhered to.

Hand-typed recipes do not sound like that sort of data.

For 200 of them, in my professional opinion, it will be _considerably_
quicker and easier to do it by hand. 200 is not many.

XKCD 1319 applies.

https://xkcd.com/1319/


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