04 Sep 2005
So I'm helping my wife do some office work for a counsellor. We started with a bunch of .xls files. We exported those as text and normalized the data with a little python program and put it back into one big spreadsheet where she enters new data as it comes. We export the data as tab-separated text to run reports on it, in python again.
I think I could do the reports in excell with VBA. I have started up the learning curve, though I really don't like investing development effort in anything other than open source technology.
Meanwhile, I wrote the python code on my laptop, but the spreadsheet is on her mac mini. I though I'd use mercurial to allow me to make changes on either side and keep in sync.
But her machine doesn't have the developer tools installed, so it doesn't have gcc, so I can't install mercurial.