Cheryl Homiak asked for a way to create time reports in the form of Excel spreadsheets. gnumeric is a free tool that can read and write Excel format files. It has a GUI, but I hoped for a CORBA or command line interface for the simple translation task. Anyway, I posted a question on the gnumeric list and got this reply from "J.H.M. Dassen (Ray)" <dm@zensunni.demon.nl>: > Gnumeric currently isn't the right tool for that job (but see > http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnumeric-list/2002-February/msg00000.html). > > In the short run, you're probably better off using catdoc's "xls2csv" and a > small perl script using the Spreadsheet::WriteExcel module to do csv -> xls. Following up on the latter, I suggest installing these Debian packages: catdoc libtext-csv-perl libspreadsheet-writeexcel-perl The last package includes the file /usr/share/doc/libspreadsheet-writeexcel-perl/examples/csv2xls.pl which converts a CSV file to XLS. Unfortunately it's not installed with execute permissions. I suggest copying it to a directory in your PATH using something like this: cp /usr/share/doc/libspreadsheet-writeexcel-perl/examples/csv2xls.pl /usr/local/bin/csv2xls chmod +x /usr/local/bin/csv2xls This should let you convert their timesheet to a CSV file which you can fill out with a regular text editor, then back to an XLS file which you can provide as a binary attachment. You should be able to use gnupg to create a detached signature of the XLS file. - Jim Van Zandt