Topic awaiting preservation: Excel to HTML (Page 1 of 1)

Excel (the spread sheet) offers this great tool which allows you to turn you Excell spread sheet into an HTML page. The problem is that the HTML is god awful. It is bloated an pretty much useless maintaining a nice and easy to use web page that is code readable. I try to be as pure as possible.

I found a little solution while surfing the web that instructs me to:
1) Convert the page to a text page and tabular data.
2) import the page into dream weaver as tabular data.

This produces the code you will see in the page below: http://studentaffairs.stonybrook.edu/safee

Has anyone found a better solution to this problem? I deal with a large number of excel sheets that need to go up and onto the web and I need an easy solution to this problem. As you will notice with the webpage listed above there is no formatting, as conversion to tabular data removes all character formatting. Just wondering if anyone has found a superior solution to this problem that I was able to find.

I just love databinding more and more !

look at http://www.ozoneasylum.com/Forum2/HTML/001905.html .

Just export your excellsheets to flat textfiles and do the rest with databinding.
Updating a page takes 5 seconds to export from excell and 5 seconds to upload.
Problem solved, case closed.

alternative c) export as cvs, parse that with a scripting language of your choice (php for example), let that output html.
little more work, but looks just the way you want it to.

I don't know that this would be a better solution but it's certainly an alternative. I used the Spreadsheet::ParseExcel and Spreadsheet::WriteExcel perl modules to write a tool to convert LDIF address books to an Excel file for import to Outlook. I also made a tool to take form input and add it to an Excel file for something similar. If you have several files that need to be converted, it might be worth while to write a XLS->html conversion tool. From working with those modules, it looks like it would fairly easy to write such a tool.

Regards,
Charlie

I am wondering if the solutions you posted are superior to what I am currently doing.

The excell sheets I get tend not to follow a specific pattern so my formatting would depend entirely on the file I recieve. Since I will recieve budget information for one department one day, the next from a different department, and then some information of enrolled students, and then one on students in tripples.

I am assuming that there is no simple tool that could handle it since all of the information is stored in such an awful format as is (in the excell sheet).

I just make named regions in the excel sheet and use the File System Object to write the page section and an ODBC connection to the region which it pulls in as a table (ASP). If anyone wants a sample let me know.