FET to Excel converter question

[sasbland]

Hello,

I'm not sure if this is the right place. I have tried FET to Excel and found that if the class has more than 1 group of students, only the first group is converted. For example,

Lesson 1 has teacher A and students Y1A and Y1B

In the excel of the teacher, it only shows student Y1A
The excel of student Y1A is correct, but the excel of student Y1B doesn't show this lesson at all.

I wonder if there is anything I can do to fix this.
Thank you very much.

[Liviu Lalescu]

Hello!

Sure, it is a right place to ask this. I hope you will get a solution from the users of the forum.

[YOUSSEF HOUIET]

Can you privid a screenshot

[sasbland]

Thank you both. Sorry it's been a long time. I finally have the timetable and have time to focus on converting it to excel. The first screenshot is the correct timetable. If we look at the two lessons with the arrow, M-FCN and M-FCE are students, FC305 and FC306 are subject.

You cannot view this attachment.

Once I used FETtoExcelExporter I get this for student M-FCE and M-FCN. You will see that the lesson FC306 only shows on student M-FCE (as it's the first student listed in that lesson) but not on student M-FCN (who is listed as the second set of student on that lesson). The same for lesson FC305 which only shows on student M-FCN but not on student M-FCE.

You cannot view this attachment.

You cannot view this attachment.

I hope that makes sense. I'd appreciate any help. Thank you very much.

[gradgrind]

I have been thinking about this a bit over the last couple of days. Although I think that, in general, a spreadsheet is not a good way to present the output from FET (why would you want to do this?), I did have some code for reading FET results lying around. Adding a bit of code to produce spreadsheets should not be too difficult, I thought ...

Well, a quick search of the forum brought up a few posts from the past, and it seems that there are at least two reasons for wanting Excel files:

1) To print the results in some sort of customized way.

2) Because some other administrative software accepts only Excel files.

Both of these will probably require tables structured in very particular ways, and be very dependent on the nature of the timetable data. They seem very fragile, in the sense that a different set of input data could break the layout assumptions. Each institution might need its own customized version of the converter. That is not an encouraging basis for a developer to work on.

There are certainly better solutions for printing – all the data is available in the XML, so why convert it to Excel before working on it? I have done some work on printing timetables. Because of the extreme flexibility of FET, it is very difficult (impossible?) to find a layout/structure which will satisfy all requirements, in general. If certain limits can be imposed on the data, quite nice results can be obtained – I have had some success with Typst, but it requires quite a lot of programming.

For providing input to other software, it would certainly be better to consult with the designers of that software, in the hope of getting them to provide a better input interface! Of course, that is not always possible ...

Anyway, for anyone who really wants Excel documents, I have put up a little "proof of concept" at fet2xlsx. It should work roughly like FETtoExcelExporter, but it uses different input files (the "..._data_and_timetable.fet" ones) and is cross-platform. I have posted runnable files for Windows and Linux.

[Liviu Lalescu]

Thank you for your work, Michael! I hope the users will benefit from your program.

[sasbland]

Hi,

Thank you both for your time and effort. The main reason for us to have excel timetable is for other people who use the timetable for other purposes, and they work in excel mainly. I'll try fet2xlxs. Thank you very much.

[sasbland]

Do I have to perform this below in order to get the fet2xlsx.exe? I don't have Linux, is there any other way? Many thanks

Command line (Linux)
First make the program executable, then

./fet2xlsx path/to/test1_data_and_timetable.fet