RE: FN-FORUM: Re: Editing Word and excel docs on a hosted ISP server

date posted 26th July 2005 00:09

>
> > I'd say you're largely buggered on the excel front.
>
> Actually Excel is easy to interface to from a web server.
>
> If you're excel is reasonably recent, simply output an HTML table with
> what you want, and give it the extension.xls - Excel will read the HTML
> and turn it into a spreadsheet quite happily.
>
> You can do formatting and equations too - try outputting an Excel
> spreadsheet as HTML to see how MS store the equation info in the HTML.
> It's not pretty but it works fine!
>
> colspan and rowspan even work to merge cells together in the
> spreadsheet :)
>

Slightly off the point - I did exactly that in an early job I had, but was
saving the resulting .xls to a network share on a fileserver.

Co-incidentally about 5 minutes after saving the file the server would
crash. We managed to replicate the problem on network shares for other
computers in the company. I seem to remember it was filling various log
files with loads of stuff.

This was NT 4.0 - but just be warey about saving as HTML to a network share
from excel.

Quite amusing at the time (although not as amusing as when we totally
wrecked an AS/400 by disconnecting it from the network :) )