From: Chris Hulan <chris.hulan@...>
Date: 2008-10-28T02:59:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Open a MS Excel file from within Ruby

On Oct 25, 1:20 pm, RichardOnRails
<RichardDummyMailbox58...@uscomputergurus.com> wrote:
> Hi.
>
> I'm writing a small Ruby pgm to demonstrate that FasterCVS is a good
> way to handle CSV data.
>
> I put up a small CSV file and demonstrated the FasterCSV aspect.  I'd
> like to precede that step by automatically bringing up the CSV file in
> Excel. (I know I could bring it up manually, but I'd like a self-
> contained demo for a computer-illiterate person.)
>
> I've got "fn" set to a string which is the fully qualified name of the
> CSV file.  I concocted the (failing) command:
>
> SystemCommand.start("Excel", fn)
>
> based on my interpretation of the RDoc for Shell::SystemCommand.  I
> took a wild stabs to no avail at adding "require 'system'" and
> "require 'shel'"
>
> I'm running:
> ruby 1.8.6 (2007-09-24 patchlevel 111) [i386-mswin32]
> WinXP-Pro/SP3
>
> TIA,
> Richard

You probably should look at system (its in kernel so no require
needed)
something like:
system "start excel c:\\pathto\\my\\file.csv"

cheers