Excel properties

[middletree]

Curt and McKirahan have been very helpful the past week as I have been
introduced to something new to me: generating a spreadsheet from ASP.

Now that I have the spreadsheet, I am in need of knowledge about how to
control the properties. By properties, I mean font, hyperlink, and color
information. I'd like the spreadsheet to have the same data as the HTML page
it's getting the data from, but in a different format. I have been searching
in
several places, including the Excel Help files, but cannot find any info on
how to do this.

I'm not asking anyone to tell me how to do this; just looking for where to
find out how to do this.

Anyone here have any idea where I can look?

 

[Tom Kaminski [MVP]]

Curt and McKirahan have been very helpful the past week as I have been
introduced to something new to me: generating a spreadsheet from ASP.

Now that I have the spreadsheet, I am in need of knowledge about how to
control the properties. By properties, I mean font, hyperlink, and color
information. I'd like the spreadsheet to have the same data as the HTML page
it's getting the data from, but in a different format. I have been searching
in
several places, including the Excel Help files, but cannot find any info on
how to do this.

I'm not asking anyone to tell me how to do this; just looking for where to
find out how to do this.

Anyone here have any idea where I can look?

In addition to what Curt said, try creating the spreadsheet first in Excel
and then save it as HTML. Look at the resulting code so you can "reverse
engineer" the proper output format you need.

 

[larrybud2002]

Anyone here have any idea where I can look?

In addition to what Curt said, try creating the spreadsheet first in Excel
and then save it as HTML. Look at the resulting code so you can "reverse
engineer" the proper output format you need.

No need to reverse engineering most of it since MS puts out
documentation on how to use this:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnoffxml/html/ofxml2k.asp

We use Excel basically for our print engine in ASP reports. I have a
default style sheet that sets up page margins, "fit to" properties, and
"repeat at top" setting which I pass in via a session variable to
repeat a certain # of rows at each page. Works great. There's just a
couple of annoyances in Excel, such as when you put a formula in a
cell, it doesn't automatically change the width of the cell to fit the
RESULT of the formula, so you have to specifically set the width in
pixels.

 

[middletree]

Now I dont know this for sure, but since the HTML code for generating an XLS
is really just an html table/cell thing you should be able to use these same
tags to set some attributes. Beyond that you may have to go to using a
component for your doc. There are limited capabilities in
HTML/ASP/VbScript/etc....

Well, the problem is, there are things in the presentation on the HTML page
(from which the spreadsheet is launched) that I don't want in the
spreadsheet, such as hyperlinks, the gridlines not showing, etc, as well as
some things to be changed, such as background colors, fonts, etc.

So I'm assuming there is some sort of a DOM for this, but I can't find any
doc on it.

 

[middletree]

In addition to what Curt said, try creating the spreadsheet first in Excel
and then save it as HTML. Look at the resulting code so you can "reverse
engineer" the proper output format you need.

I don't think I'm doing a good job of explaining myself. I have a web page,
and is displays data. I want to export that data into a spreadsheet, with
the click of a button. I have this working successfully. However, the
resulting spreadsheet carries the properties that the HTML version has,
properties that I don't want it to carry over. The gridlines don't show, the
rows are alternating colors, I'd like to change the fonts, and I'd like to
remove the hyperlinks.

I figure this thing must have a DOM or some way to specify properties as it
generates the spreadsheet, but I am looking for instructions on how to do
this.

 

[middletree]

Hmmm, if I write up a style sheet, separate for the ASP page which produces
the spreadsheet, I wonder if that might work.

 

[larrybud2002]

I don't think I'm doing a good job of explaining myself. I have a web page,
and is displays data. I want to export that data into a spreadsheet, with
the click of a button. I have this working successfully. However, the
resulting spreadsheet carries the properties that the HTML version has,
properties that I don't want it to carry over. The gridlines don't show, the
rows are alternating colors, I'd like to change the fonts, and I'd like to
remove the hyperlinks.

I figure this thing must have a DOM or some way to specify properties as it
generates the spreadsheet, but I am looking for instructions on how to do
this.

Have two style sheets, one where it's an HTML view, the other for
Excel.

 

[middletree]

I've used this method to change the appearance of a web page when printing
before, and in fact, use it on this same Intranet app. I didn't know you
could specify it for Excel files that you build through ASP. In your
example, does it use the media=screeen, or media=print to apply to the
spreadsheet? Remember, I'm trying to affect the way the spreadsheet looks on
the screen. It may or may not get printed.

 

[middletree]

Have two style sheets, one where it's an HTML view, the other for
Excel.

So you specify one on the new ASP page (not the one which contains the
button to geerate the .xls file)?

 

[middletree]

Ok. I don't have my code handy right now, but as I recall I had:

Page 1, which consists of a table built by ASP using an SQL query. It looks
like this:
http://www.middletree.net/sort.htm

Keep in mind that that's an HTML page that I put out on my personal site,
not the real deal. But I got it by saving the real one to an HTML file, so
it's an example of the possible output for page 1.

Now, Page 1 has a submit button at the bottom (not shown in the example
page), which calls you to what we'll refer to as Page 2. That page has no
HTML, just some ASP. To see that code, see the answer given to me in the
thread which I began March 25 at 11:42 AM Central time. I used that code as
a basis for what I did.

So Page 1 has ASP which builds an HTML table. Page 2 just has some ASP code
which tells it to take everything in that table and build a spreadsheet.
Since Page 2 has no HTML, I don't see room for code which references a
stylesheet.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, just trying to understand how this could
be done. If you tell me that I should just put the style sheet with the
proper formatting in that second page, then I'll try it out first thing
tomorrow morning.

Even then, though, I don't know how I'd code to include the gridlines (which
currently aren't showing in the resulting spreadsheet). I tried simply
having the table to have a border of 1 instead of 0, but that didn't do the
trick. I am still trying to find some documentation which describes the
syntax for this stuff.

I appreciate your bearing with me.

 

[larrybud2002]

So you specify one on the new ASP page (not the one which contains the
button to geerate the .xls file)?

The style sheet reference is on the final HTML/XLS page. The reference
would to the CSS would be dynamic.