g.oo (Bumblebee's sister project)

g.oo is a minimal set of components which link Open Office to Grasshopper. The sister project to Bumblebee, it uses similar structuring in component layouts and workflow, though simpler and with more limited options.

The collection includes components for the transfer of data and formatting from grasshopper to cells in an open office spreadsheet as well as the creation of charts. 

Components are developed for interchangeability and reuse and designed to allow for flexible application ranging from high speed data transfer with minimal component inputs to full cell, text, and chart formatting though the use of the style inputs.

Built on the Open Office Star language and Visual Basic, Bumblebee is written in Grasshopper VB nodes, and made available as a series of editable user objects that can easily be modified by anyone.

The goal of g.oo is to offer an experience as simple as plugin data into an output and hitting go to a level of customization that where every graphic element can be uniquely controlled for every item of data.

Future iterations look to include conditional formatting, graphic object creation, and solver access.

Due to restrictions on the level of accessibility in open office and its ease of compatibility with the visual basic scripting language, g.oo does its best to approximate the base functionality available in Bumblebee. This means certain things, like disabling the screen redrawing when updating content is not possible. The result is a noticeable lag in transfer speeds for things like chart and cell formatting that operate on a per cell basis. However much of the same functionality has been maintained. Data transfer, for example, does allow for per range rather than per cell operations. As a result basic data and uniform formatting require only one operation and therefore take a very small amount of time to complete. While bumblebee has grown to include a large array of application interface components, g.oo is, and most likely will remain, relatively simple. This is partly due to the limited formatting, graphic, and interoperability capacity, but also due to the relative size of the user community online and hence documentation. While there are unique aspects to OpenOffice, such as its solver, development will most likely remain limited.