[thelist] MS Excel Question

[Simon Willison]

Resurreccion, Dennis M. wrote:
> Place a dollar sign, e.g. =B15+$C$15. The dollar sign just indicates
> that the location is absolute.

Wow, you know I've never seen one question inspire 10 identical answers 
before!

<tip type="Producing Excel Spreadsheets">
A little known but very useful fact: you can output data from a server 
side script in Microsoft Excel format extremely easily, just by creating 
a simple HTML table (with cell bgcolor attributes to set different 
colours) and serving it to the user with an application/ms-excel content 
type. This has the unfortunate effect of causing Excel to open within 
IE, which many users find confusing. Alternatively, you can serve the 
data as a simple tab delimited file with the following headers:

Content-type: application/octet-stream
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=excelfile.xls

Which will allow the author to download the file for later opening in Excel.
</tip>