Re: Producing Excel spreadsheet from XML data

[MacEwan, ]
>
> 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).
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>

Several things come to mind:

1) Excel (97+) is very good at importing an html file and displaying it.  If
you used a stylesheet to create an html file and got Excel to open it, you
might get just what you need.

2) You might be able to script excel to use msxml3 to retrieve the xml file,
transform it, and then populate the spreadsheet from the transformed DOM.

Otherwise, your approach seems very do-able.

Cheers,

Tom P


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