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Re: Producing Excel spreadsheet from XML data
- To: xsl-list at lists dot mulberrytech dot com
- Subject: Re: [xsl] Producing Excel spreadsheet from XML data
- From: Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril dot ie>
- Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 23:53:01 +0100
- Organization: Silmaril Consultants
- References: <DD3244BDF5B4D411BB9D0060948A3B630162BC79@IGMAIL4>
- Reply-To: xsl-list at lists dot mulberrytech dot com
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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