[thelist] Spreadsheet Quandary

Aredridel aredridel at nbtsc.org
Tue Jul 22 09:31:51 CDT 2003


> The question is can we somehow read an Excel spreadsheet and output the
> data into a web page. Like a template that reads the rows of data and
> outputs them. Since these are going onto CD for the sales force we can't
> use a data base like MySQL. Is there some javascript out there that can
> help us, or does any body have some ideas on how to handle this?

I'd export it as a CSV or TSV file, and use a language like Ruby, Perl
or PHP to parse it and spit out HTML.  Export makes it simple to read
and parse, but leaves it in columnar format for the tools to parse.

The other option is to use a MySQL database, set your server to use
.html as a PHP file (not hard), then just use a web-mirroring tool to
download the copies for the sales force to burn to CD -- since you
download via HTTP, you get rendered [html] pages instead of scripts.

Ari



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