I have a spreadsheet. Made in OpenOffice.org Calc. Really simple. No formulas.

I need to write a script in Bash that can access that information. That will make some LaTeX code with the values from the cells mixed in...

So I need some way for Bash to get information from the spreadsheet. Is there a simple spreadsheet file format I can export this to? What application can I put in a Bash script that will simply echo, for instance, the contents of A4.

What should I look for?

Save it as a CSV file (Comma Separated Values) and it'll become a text file with the columns of the spreadsheet separated by commas (hence the name! ). Parsing that in awk to extract the value from the 4th row in the first column (A4) is a doddle...

Great, thanks!

When I had to do this some years ago I created a macro in OOCalc and called the macro in the document from the command line. Office didn't even have to start in the GUI. After that I used awk to retrieve the values.

Here is a list with threads describing this process:
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=12922
If you read a few of these threads you'll understand what the principle is, choose the simplest one for your needs.

I hope that in the mean time better methods have come up. OOBasic is incomprehensible, error-prone, zero debug possibilities stops working from one version to the next. That is the reason why I cannot point you to a working method, because I don't remember which ones worked and which were broken.

jlinkels