Raspberry Pi, Nextcloud, OnlyOffice, and some Python Too

One of the first projects I tried out on the Raspberry Pi was implementing a personal cloud. It has been working quite well, but there was still the "catch" that the document editing application servers available for Nextcloud do not work on the Pi. Well, some clever person shared a method to get one of those servers (OnlyOffice) working! After following the instructions provided, I was able to create, open, and edit Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files! Mostly. As of this writing, there is an issue with actually saving changes to Excel files. What I can do is open and view an Excel file.

Pre-post update: So, before I was even able to post this, Collabora Online (one of the other document editing application servers) released and official ARM64 version that works on the Raspberry Pi. I have just barely started playing around with it, but will do a separate post with my impressions comparing OnlyOffice and Collabora Online. Now to continue with the original post.

I wrote about using Python to read web sites for data points, then save that data to a Google Sheet. I know a lot of people use Google Drive, but I have my own personal cloud storage service, now with its own Office capabilities. From that article:

I do hope to use my own personal cloud to store the data

I started by downloading my existing Google Sheet as an Excel file and saving it to my Nextcloud. Next, I opened up the file to make sure OnlyOffice could read it. It worked great, keeping the formulae and line graph intact. Finally, I needed to figure out how to read and write the Excel file using a Python script on the Pi.

openpyxl is the Python library I found to get the job done. It includes methods and procedures very similar to the gspread library used for Google Sheets, and it did not take much time at all to translate my existing script. I now have a script that reads data from a web site, and saves it into an Excel spreadsheet on my own personal cloud.

I am pretty happy with the progress I'm making on my various Pi projects, and look forward to the next ones even as I work through the bugs on the current projects.