Managing excel files in DATTES

DATTES aims to work in any OS (Windows, Linux, Mac) independently if you are using MATLAB or GNU Octave.

Handling Excel files varies depending on the operating system and platform (MATLAB, GNU Octave). For this reason, in DATTES we have chosen to use external python-based tools to export excel files to a uniform .csv format. This tools are called pet4dattes (python external tools for DATTES) and they are included in DATTES in folder external_tools/pet4dattes.

To use pet4dattes you need python in your computer and you also need to install some requirements.

Ask your system administrator to install python in your computer if needed.

Installation using pip

You can use pip to install pet4dattes requirements in this way:

1. Open a terminal (command window)
2. Go to pet4dattes folder:

cd path_to_dattes/external_tools/pet4dattes

3. Run pip :

pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Test installation:

python3 ss2csv.py tests/*.*

This command will convert every *.xls, *.xlsx and *.ods in tests subfolder to *.csv files (one file per sheet).

5. Delete *.csv files, e.g. in unix systems:

rm tests/*/*.csv
rmdir tests/*

If you have any other python based software you should consider to create a specific environment for each software to avoid conflict between requirements.

This can be done with venv or conda for example.

Installation using conda and pip

1. Download and install anaconda or miniconda
   • e.g. for miniconda: https://docs.anaconda.com/free/miniconda/
2. Create an environment:

conda create -n dattes python

3. Activate environment:

conda activate dattes

4. Install requirements

pip install -r requirements.txt

5. Test installation as above

6. From now when you will be using pet4dattes from MATLAB you will need to start MATLAB from this environment. For this you need to launch MATLAB from the terminal as follows:

conda activate dattes
matlab