Using ssconvert remotely

If you’ve ever used ssconvert (part of the gnumeric package) via an SSH session then you’re likely to have seen the horde of warnings that are displayed:

GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; the most common cause is a missing or misconfigured D-Bus session bus daemon. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details – 1: Not running within active session)

… [repeated many times] …

(ssconvert:11925): GConf-WARNING **: Directory `/apps/gnumeric’ was not being monitored by GConfClient 0x87cf220

There is a simple workaround for this that may be helpful if you are calling ssconvert multiple times within a makefile or similar and don’t want to add additional huge amounts of useless output. Simply prepend DISPLAY=:0 onto the command and it will be happy (i.e. DISPLAY=:0 ssconvert [args]).

As a bonus, here’s a simple command line to turn an Excel worksheet into a csv file, something I have to do fairly often when setting up processing of data from other people:

ssconvert --export-type=Gnumeric_stf:stf_assistant -O 'sheet="sheet_name"
    separator=, quoting-mode="auto" eol="unix"' input_file output_file

Replace sheet_name, input_file, and output_file with your own values.