Re: Producing Excel spreadsheet from XML data

On Fri, 08 Jun 2001, James MacEwan wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> My question is of the general architectural type, similar to the one about
> Quark yesterday.
> 
> I am investigating populating an Excel 97 spreadsheet with an XSLT
> transformation of existing XML data.  I would like to produce the
> spreadsheet file as an enhancement to an existing batch process on a (DONS
> ASBESTOS SUIT) Unix server (ASBESTOS SUIT OFF).  

Why the asbestos suit? This sounds like an ideal platform.

> Similar to the answers about Quark, I suspect that an XSL solution that
> directly produces a pretty, formatted spreadsheet will be really ugly if not
> impossible under Unix.

On the contrary, I would have thought it would be rather easier
than elsewhere. Assuming you can specify what is to go in which
cell, you can write a transformation to output DIF or CSV which
any spreadsheet should be able to load. The operating system is
really not relevant. 

> Instead will I have to implement a three step process?  (1) call an XSL
> script to transform my input XML into an output document (say a CSV text
> file) that contains the desired data. (2) FTP the output document to my NT
> server (3) write VBScript to import the output document into the pretty
> Excel spreadsheet.

Um. File|Open does a pretty good job of loading CSV. Why
VBScript? Or is it a requirement that the file pops up under
program control? Is this being triggered by an event on the Unix
server, or an event happening elsewhere?

///Peter

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