Working with KBART files in LibreOffice¶
We provide here a simple example of how to perform data extraction from BACON with LibreOffice (a free and open source office suite, created and maintained by The Document Foundation). We’ll show how to automatically retrieve coverage data for Open Access Journals from OpenEdition Journals.
Table of Contents
Setting up a link to external data¶
First, create a new LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet. Once this is done, in the menu bar, select “Sheet”, and then “Link to External Data…” in the dropdown menu.
In the opening window, fill the URL with the desired KBART package. You’ll find all the availables KBART packages and their matching URL in the access section of this documentation.
Be careful to add the extension “.txt” at the end of the URL, otherwise LibreOffice won’t load the data. Press enter.
Importation¶
A new window should open, asking for importation settings. Tabulation should be selected as the separator:
Validate importation and external data dialogs. The data should have been imported in your spreadsheet:
Working with the data¶
Now let’s rename this sheet as “BACON” and switch to another sheet. From this one, which won’t be affected when we update the data, we can perform usual operations with Libreoffice: filtering, using formulas & macros, etc.
For example, in order to search for a given journal by its e-ISSN and return its first available issue, we can enter this formula in the A1 cell: (The searched ISSN has to be entered in cell B1)
=CONCAT(VLOOKUP(B1;$BACON.C:E;2;0);"-";VLOOKUP(B1;$BACON.C:E;3;0))
With a little practice, powerful tools can be built this way, in order to monitor publications or track newly available issues. The extensive Libreoffice documentation may be of some help.
Updating data¶
This file can be saved to be reused with newer data or another Kbart file.
When needed, the data might be updated by using the “Links to external files” in the “Edit” menu:
