Converting Openoffice Calc spreadsheet to image

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 | linux, useful tools

Just a quick tip, if you have a spreadsheet or part of a spreadsheet in Openoffice Calc which you want to convert to an image (for use in a web page or something).

I was initially dismayed to find that Export and Save As in Openoffice calc only support other spreadsheet formats, XHTML and PDF (to be fair, the XHTML is pretty clean compared to that output by Microsoft Office but it wasn’t what I wanted in this case).

After some playing around, I figured out a pretty easy way of converting my spreadsheet to an image. I highlighted the table in Openoffice calc and clicked on Edit / Copy. Then I started the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) – I guess other graphics programs should work equally well – and clicked on File / Acquire / Paste as New and voilà – the spreadsheet appeared in a new GIMP window ready to be saved in whatever graphics format you wish.

(I did this on a Linux system, I’d be curious to know if the same works on Windows).

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6 Comments to Converting Openoffice Calc spreadsheet to image

Mark Dowling
April 2, 2009

Steve, in Windows there is the option to install a TIFF printer like Zan or if running Office2K7 the Document Image Writer printer. Alternatively you could follow the Ghostscript method outlined here but I haven’t tried it myself.

http://server3.nethost.co.il/set_tif.html

stephen mulcahy
April 2, 2009

Hey Mark,

Good to hear from you. The TIFF printer approach looks interesting. It might give you a bit more control over the layout of the output than the cut and paste approach (although I think its a pretty elegant solution).
Good to see some alternatives though (did you try the cut and paste on Windows?).

Thanks,

-stephen

fanch
May 26, 2010

Hi,
under linux with opencalc 3.2 and ubunti 10.4, it doesn’t seem to work 🙁
under XP i was used to paste it into irfanview with success!

Jelou
November 5, 2010

Yes, fanch. In Windows you can even put a form button in the sheet and assign a macro that select the cells you want and create an image on the background using IrfanView command line, so you can save as images a lot of tables in diferent sheets with just one click! I’m looking for something similar in linux but it seems to be imposible, because i can’t read or “paste” the clipboard data with any software. I’ve tried gimp, imagemagick… with no result 🙁
Of course, the method mentioned here works but it’s slow if you have to save a lot of images. Any alternative will be welcome.

TC
January 29, 2011

I tried using a screen capture software but it just couldn’t capture the whole table I wanted. The auto-scroll capture feature won’t work in OpenOffice.

You just solved my headache. Cool.

Thanks.

smulcahy
January 29, 2011

Happy it helped.

-stephen