Re: Generating an Excel Report

Or, if you're feeling lazy and your needs are modest, you can just output a tab-delimited text file with a ".xls" extension and Excel will happily open it without complaint. You don't even if to go through the "import" process in Excel; double-clicking the file opens it right up, at least in Excel versions from the last couple of years.

Gary Blackburn
Trained Killer

Comment on Re: Generating an Excel Report

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Re: Re: Generating an Excel Report by ViceRaid (Chaplain) on Mar 02, 2004 at 09:01 UTC
Or (again, if your needs are simple), use a comma separated format.	[reply]
Re: Re: Generating an Excel Report by delirium (Chaplain) on Mar 02, 2004 at 14:21 UTC
The naming a file .xls trick has more uses, too. You can mark up an HTML table and apply font and centering options, and also formulas, then save it as .xls, and Excel won't complain. See this snippet for a simple example. Formulas look like this: `<td x:num x:fmla="=B2+1"></td>` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Re: Generating an Excel Report by Grygonos (Chaplain) on Mar 02, 2004 at 15:49 UTC
If you're on a Win32 platform you can also use Win32::OLE I don't know if it is bulkier or less efficient than Spreadsheet::WriteExcel, but it's what I have used, in the past (well yesterday really). Read more... (14 kB) This script runs some queries against a SQL Server Database to create the report that is then created and formatted via Win32::OLE. This is really more than you need, but its an example of a report that uses a decent amount of features and gives you an idea of what kind of code is needed to properly format something. Writing your own is more rewarding than gutting this one and making it fit your needs, so please do so if you find this one useful. Grygonos	[reply] [d/l]


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