I’m a bit narked. Open Office didn’t close down cleanly after I saved a … rather large spreadsheet I’d been working on the other day (ZUM! catalogue data normalisation) & corrupted the data in the file. With (the much appreciated) help of Paul at work I’ve managed to recover A to K, but L to Z plus some sundries are gone – lost – kaput – GAH!* I’m not what you might call happy. I guess it wouldn’t be so bad but I’d nearly got to this stage of Data sifting before when I lost the memory stick I was storing it on.

At least I have a portion of information to go from thanks to Paul & I realise that I did make back up a week or so back which s going to have a bit of useful raw data on it (so I don’t have to compile the rest of the spreadsheet from). A lot of time saved, but a lot of time lost. It’s going to take me long enough to figure out what I’m supposed to do to get ZUM! running from a database & have a CMS allowing contributions…

*For the record the .ods file format that Openoffice uses is basically XML data, but it seems that the file format is a compressed container file which can be opened (change file extension to .zip & open in decompression utility) there you see the .xml files. The ‘content.xml’ (which contains the raw data from the spreadsheet cells) was corrupted in this case, It was too difficult for me to spot where – I did note corruption but as the xml file is all one long line (to safe file size) but couldn’t get a grip. Paul could get the data separated out into something readable (using Perl) & then chop out the bad data leaving recoverable data, dropping the recovered context.xml into a new blank ods file.