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Program to beautify crappy exports from other applications?

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superboyac:
Often times at work, I'm using a really great tool to help me do something.  Stuff like InfoQube, Mylife Organized, etc.  These programs have beautiful ways of presenting information on the screen.  However, when they export or print, it looks like shit.  And you usually have to take it over to Excel or Word, and do some manual massaging to get it to look halfway decent.  These programs are business type tools, and there's no way to print directly from the program (one-click) and take that paper to a meeting with "important" people because it looks so bad.

Is there a program that can take these exports from software (csv, tab-delimited text files, xml files, etc.) and create a preset rules for that kind of file, and then once the rules are made, you can have a one-click solution to beautiful reports.  Is there anything like that?

I'll give an example of the problem.  the first screenshot below is what the MLO screen looks like.  The second one is what it prints out (there's no way to change it).  How could I possibly take that to a meeting?
Program to beautify crappy exports from other applications?
Program to beautify crappy exports from other applications?

When that happens, it makes me really torn about wanting to use the program.  I NEED the program because it can do things no other program can do.  On the other hand, I can't share the data with anyone because they expect reports on paper.  So then I have to massage it in another application like Excel.  But it comes to a point where I say F-it, I'll just do the whole thing on Excel.  And then I stop using the program.  Then, developers wonder why they don't have more users.

skwire:
I avoid putting in printing options in my apps like the plague.  From a programming standpoint, it's a huge pain in the arse with very little reward.  Mouser and I were talking and, sometimes, the easiest thing would be for the app to dump its data to an HTML table and let a browser handle the printing.

40hz:
You could copy to the clipboard, run PureText on it (which would strip out all the junk) and then paste in back into something like Word.

Once there, it should be relatively easy to create macros or a script to prettify it. I do this with a few things I'm responsible for where it's not worth the effort to pursue a more complex solution.

Not ideal, but it will give you something to use in the interim. Plus, copying to the clipboard gets around the hassles of trying to reverse engineer proprietary file formats so you can get at the underlying data.

timns:
If MLO outputs XML, you can use XSL to turn it into any layout you like. With some effort, of course. No doubt there are folks on here who can help. There's also some pretty good software out there that can get you started.

Stylus Studio springs to mind.

If you have CSV I would say some pretty simple regex to split up the lines and add some formatting would not be too bad either.

Lastly of course you could request someone on here to write something for you.

f0dder:
Personally I'd rather take #2 to a meeting than #1 - the formatting is less than optimal, but it doesn't have the "color puke explosion" nastiness of #1 :)

Anyway, sure, if you can export to a sane, well-structured format (XML, CSV, whatever) it's definitely possible to write an auto-formatter. For XML, it might be as simple as defining a stylesheet.

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