Re: Generating / Parsing XLS Files

Jeremy Evans
Mon, 07 Nov 2005 08:31:32 -0000

On 11/6/05, Jim Jeffers
<rails-u78NUfcIof50Y1uG8So6J1aTQe2KTcn/@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
> Hello,
> I was wondering if anyone knew of any plugins, patches, or practices
> for generating excel files.  Also if there is a way to parse and
> process uploaded xls files (this is probably much more complicated)
> I''m interested in discovering how to do that as well.  Thanks!

If you are just going to be outputting columnar data, you can always
just format it as csv, which Excel should read fine.  If you have to
actually generate Excel files, you should be able to if you are
running on Windows and have Excel installed, using WIN32OLE (see
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/win32.html).  Parsing Excel files will
almost certainly require the use of WIN32OLE or something similar.