Need a suggestion on how to process XLS files

Question

Hello.
I need to process XLS files: compare 2 files and add in the first one lines from the second one. If some columns are the same, I need to add just amount (summarize numbers) and if some columns in second file are not in the first one, I need to add them to first one.
I need a tool suggestion. First I thought it will be easily done with Python and I prefer Python but after some search I'm not so sure anymore... Seems like Python won't do it smoothly as from here it looks rather foggy how to do it.
Please suggest something. XLS files contain tabs and I need to be able to read/write/modify inside of different tabs.

Answer 1

graysky wrote:If this is a one-off
It's not and those documents will have several thousand items each. So even one time I couldn't do it manually. Plus I'll have to do it weekly. Probably even more than once a week.
The idea is this.
Suppose we have "1.xls" with contects:
+----+-------------+-----------+
| ID | Name | Amount |
+----+-------------+-----------+
| 1 | apple | 2 |
| 2 | potato | 3 |
| 3 | cherry | 10 |
| 4 | water-melon | 1 |
+----+-------------+-----------+
Then we have "2.xls":
+----+-------------+-----------+
| ID | Name | Amount |
+----+-------------+-----------+
| 4 | water-melon | 1 |
| 5 | pumpkin | 1 |
+----+-------------+-----------+
And the script must sum them up basing on ID so the result must look like:
+----+-------------+-----------+
| ID | Name | Amount |
+----+-------------+-----------+
| 1 | apple | 2 |
| 2 | potato | 3 |
| 3 | cherry | 10 |
| 4 | water-melon | 2 |
| 5 | pumpkin | 1 |
+----+-------------+-----------+
We had 1 new element with ID 5 and it's now at the bottom. And we had 1 similar, with ID 4 — they were summed up to amount == 2.
All this is xls and with tabs.
Can I do it with php? “R” is just too new to me at the moment and this job will need to be done soon.
Last edited by Mr. Alex (2013-04-03 18:19:39)