expo1967:

Then you should check out Spreadsheet::WriteExcel. Normally you'd use Excel::Writer::XLSX, but that uses the newer .xlsx format.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

You could also just generate a CSV file. That works fine in lots of versions of Excel. :)

Yes and no. CSV is very portable, but, certainly on web-pages, subject to locale-trouble. As the separator (esp on Windows) is depending on the locale setting, it might do strange things on other poeple's machines.

As XLS, the old style Excel, is very well documented, it is much safer to generate your data as CSV and convert it to Excel (.xls) yourself and use that for the CGI.


Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

You could also just generate a CSV file. That works fine in lots of versions of Excel. :)

There are a lot of problems i used to face when creating CSV/TDF files for Excel. I first encountered this problem dealing with leading zeros and stock numbers that looked like 1E123. Below find a csv file that documents some of them.

="--------------------" 
="leading equals fixes these" 

"something excell may think as a date"
,="2012-12-12"
,"2012-12-12"

,="2/4"
,"2/4"

"something excell may think is a number"
,="1e123"
,"1e123"

"leading zeros"
,="00001"
,"00001"

"leading equals"
,="=x"
,"=x"

"there are more that ive forgotten" 

="--------------------" 
="leading equals busts these" 

"commas in string"
,"created,2016-06-19-03-02-26"
,="created,2016-06-19-03-02-26"

"long strings"
,"|001-----0|010-----0|020-----0|030-----0|040-----0|050-----0|060----
+-0|070-----0|080-----0|090-----0|101-----0|110-----0|120-----0|130---
+--0|140-----0|150-----0|160-----0|170-----0|180-----0|190-----0|201--
+---0|210-----0|220-----0|230-----0|240-----0|250-----0|260-----0|270-
+----0|280-----0|290-----0"
,="|001-----0|010-----0|020-----0|030-----0|040-----0|050-----0|060---
+--0|070-----0|080-----0|090-----0|101-----0|110-----0|120-----0|130--
+---0|140-----0|150-----0|160-----0|170-----0|180-----0|190-----0|201-
+----0|210-----0|220-----0|230-----0|240-----0|250-----0|260-----0|270
+-----0|280-----0|290-----0"

"so everthing is output as =""..."" that does not have a comma or is l
+ong" 
"you can still perform arithmatic on a =""..."" when it is a number"
[download]

As you can see i used what i called the "literal function" (="...") to deal with many of them.

You could also just generate a CSV file. That works fine in lots of versions of Excel. :)

And as an extra bonus, the users are not locked in to Excel, but could also use other spreadsheet applications. On the other hand, most of them can read Excel files, more or less.

One quite obvious difference between XLS(X) and CSV is that you can not add any formatting to CSV. You simply can not make one row bold or a column green, or a cell contain a big fat warning. For that, you need one of the Excel formats, or generate HTML and perhaps a style sheet. Of course, importing HTML into Excel is a completely different problem.

Alexander

--
Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)

Other advantages of XLS/XLSX/ODS over CSV:

• Multiple sheets
• Multiple encodings (CSV has no official support for encodings at all, unless you use a BOM which breaks many parsers)
• Comments and notes
• Hiding columns and/or rows
• Happy managers

Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn