From: Jacob Quinn Shenker <jqshenker@...>
Date: 2005-10-28T13:24:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Oldest Ruby hacker?

How about youngest Ruby hacker?
On 10/27/05, Charles Roper <charles.roper@gmail.com> wrote:> Chris McMahon wrote:> > He had to do some math on the values in the table.  I hacked up my test> > data framework to parse his spreadsheet (took about 15 minutes), and> > now he's learning Ruby (and the very nice ScriptingExcel page at Ruby> > Garden) because he just couldn't do his work with VBA.>> I too am learning Ruby (I am a mere 30 though) and have started with> hacking at Excel spreadsheets as a) I have to do a lot of this in my> work, thus making rather dry work quite fun (ah, the magic of Ruby);> and b) VBA makes my skin crawl. The Scripting Excel page on the Garden> has been invaluable for this, but I'm finding reading in values from> cells and writing them back again to be extremely slow. Once in a Ruby> array they process like lightening. Has anyone got any tips for> speeding up the parsing of ranges, and writing them back again?>> Here's an example of how I'm iterating over a range (simplified for> clarity):>> my_range = "$A$2:$A$3000"> my_array = []> sheet.range(my_range).each { |cell| my_array << cell.value }>> On large ranges, where I slot arrays within arrays, doing this kind of> thing seems to take an age, even on my Athlon64 3200. To give you some> idea, reading in an 8000 row x 20 column worksheet takes over 1 minute> and 45 seconds, while writing takes about 80 seconds. The actual> processing Ruby does on the arrays is about 1 second from what I can> tell.>> Chris - I'd love to take a look at your Excel parsing framework.> Perhaps it'll help me get my head around Ruby a little more.>> Many thanks,>> Charles Roper>>>