A few notes to self on generating .xls files from HTML tables, particularly with CSS.
It appears that excel only has a particular ‘range’ of hex numbers you can use (at least for background colours). I was trying to use #eeeeee; for a while (which is obviously fine for HTML and for creating a PDF), but I couldn’t use that as a value in excel as the colours just weren’t displaying. Perhaps the colour was too close to white?
In any event, once I chose a darker colour (#bbbbbb) the background colour appeared fine!
Another issue was that HTML allows you to specifiy multiple CSS classes such as:
This wasn’t working for me, so for that <th> I added an inline style:
If anyone is interested in the code to actually launch the open/save dialogue window, here it is:
Another Excel annoyance - it will automatically format certain values, unless you force them to a string by adding x:str to cell/row/table and specifying the xmlns.
Example:
12345678900000000000
Peter Boughton
October 19th, 2007
<html xmlns:x=”urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:excel”>
<table><tr><td x:str>12345678900000000000</td></tr></table>
Peter Boughton
October 19th, 2007
Ah I’ve wanted a way around that one.
Thanks Peter
Michael Sharman
October 20th, 2007