Subject: RE: [xsl] XML data to MS-Excel?? From: "Robert C. Lyons" <boblyons@xxxxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2001 09:54:17 -0500 |
Manisha wrote: > Hello friends, > I want to convert my xml data to Ms-Excel can > some one suggest me how to start? > Thanks in advance. You can use an XSLT stylesheet to transform the XML into one of the following data formats, all of which can be imported into an Excel spreadsheet: 1) Tab delimited data - This works well if you know that none of the cell values will contain tab characters or end of line characters. However, the tab delimited data won't contain any information about fonts, colors, borders, formulas, etc. (In other words, the spreadsheets will be quite dull.) 2) Comma Separated Values (CSV) - This works well even if some cell values contain commas and/or end of line characters, since you can enclose each cell value in quotes. However, if a cell value contains a quote character, then you must escape the quote char with an additional quote char. This is doable in XSLT, but it's not easy. Also, the CSV file won't contain any information about fonts, colors, borders, formulas, etc. 3) HTML table - Excel 97+ can import (and export) an HTML table. Excel will honor the HTML attributes that control text size, color, etc. However, I believe that Excel will ignore any attributes that are defined in a CSS. The HTML can even contain some Microsoft-proprietary attributes that control number formatting. I don't think the HTML table can contain spreadsheet formulas. To learn more about importing HTML tables into Excel, you can export a variety of Excel spreadsheets to HTML and examine the resulting HTML. 4) Office 2000's HTML+XML format - Excel 2000 can import (and export) HTML+XML documents. These HTML+XML documents contain XML islands, which encode spreadsheet information that can't be expressed in HTML. I've heard that Excel 2000 can convert between binary spreadsheets and HTML+XML spreadsheets without loss of information. To learn more about this, you might want to read the "Microsoft Office HTML and XML Reference", which is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/officedev/ofxml2k/ofxml2k.htm. 5) SYLK (Symbolic Link) - If some of your users have spreadsheet software that can't import/open an HTML table but that can open a SYLK file, then you can transform the XML into SYLK. SYLK is a text-based interchange format for spreadsheets; it supports formulas, borders, fonts, point sizes, etc. SYLK is supported by Excel and other spreadsheet packages. SYLK is the RTF of spreadsheets. The problem with SYLK is that it is not well documented. You can find some links and references to some terse SYLK documents in section 14 of the comp.apps.spreadsheets FAQ at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/spreadsheets/faq/. You can also learn SYLK by creating a variety of simple spreadsheets, exporting each of them to a SYLK file and analyzing the resulting SYLK. Best regards, Bob <sig name = 'Bob Lyons' title = 'E-Commerce Consultant' company = 'Unidex, Inc.' phone = '+1-732-975-9877' email = 'boblyons@xxxxxxxxxx' url = 'http://www.unidex.com/' product = 'XML Convert: transforms flat files to XML and vice versa' /> XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
Current Thread |
---|
|
<- Previous | Index | Next -> |
---|---|---|
[xsl] XML data to MS-Excel??, manisha | Thread | RE: [xsl] XML data to MS-Excel??, Reuel Alvarez |
Re: [xsl] Computed HTML Attribute V, David Carlisle | Date | RE: [xsl] client side style sheets?, Don Bruey |
Month |