Batch processing with OpenOffice

MS did a big job spreading office format worldwide. It is almost everywhere, tons, millions of files. Often it is needed to automate processing of this files. One way is to go with MS Office with VBA or OLE automation, this requires license for office and win32 system as well. Other way is to go with Open Office, which is free and reliable.

OpenOffice  has nice batch processing features which no competitors have. About them I want to tell today. I would call this feature unattended usage or open office batch procesing. And it rocks.

Strong points of OpenOffice are

  • Works on Windows OS family as well as Linux OS
  • Can open A LOT of file formats
  • It can save to many file formats
  • It can run Macros, even VBA with http://go-oo.org
Typical applications are

Imagine you have to index 1000 doc document ?

Or upload excel table to site and extract all data from it ?

Or convert 10000 document to PDF ?

OpenOffice batch usage

Lets try something simple at first time, for example how to convert DOC to PDF ?

Here is example using Office 3.1 for how to convert from MS Word DOC to Adobe PDF.

Run OpenOffice and open in main menu Tools -> Macro -> Organize Dialog -> Modules -> My Macros

Click New button and choose name: Module1.

Insert this code into module and save

Sub SaveAsPDF( cFile )
 Dim oPropertyValue As New com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue

 cURL = ConvertToURL( cFile )

 ' Open file
 oPropertyValue.Name = "Hidden"
 oPropertyValue.Value =  True
 oDoc = StarDesktop.loadComponentFromURL( cURL, "_blank", 0, _
 Array(oPropertyValue,))

 ' Generate PDF name in same directory
 cFile = Left( cFile, Len( cFile ) - 4 ) + ".pdf"
 cURL = ConvertToURL( cFile )

 ' Save the document using a filter.
 oPropertyValue.Name = "FilterName"
 oPropertyValue.Value =  "writer_pdf_Export"
 oDoc.storeToURL( cURL, Array(oPropertyValue))

 oDoc.close( True )
End Sub

To execute this macro in unattended mode run this command:

soffice.exe -invisible "macro:///Standard.Module1.SaveAsPDF(c:\sample.doc)"

Check c:\ it should contain sample.PDF

Thats it!

You can use your editor for macros, Macro files are stored XML files, for windows look for them in

c:\Document and Settings\<user>\Application Data\OpenOffice.org\3\user\basic\Standart

Same method works in Linux. You can do it on headless server.

This is simple case. If you want to dive deeper try to google for UNO.