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Comment by cwbrandsma | Hacker News Reader

<off-topic>To all the Font wonks out there who tell me about the importance of the font to establish branding...blah,blah,blah. The font on this site, while cool looking is very hard to read.</off-topic>

<on-topic> Something I tell junior devs when making reports, if the data can't be exported to excel, then it isn't a report. It doesn't matter how cool your filter/sorting capabilities are, how good you make the data look, your charts could be beautiful to behold. If you can't export the data to excel then you haven't done anything of value as far as the custom is concerned, because they will ONLY look at the data if it is in Excel. In many companies, that is the only feature that is used (the export to excel).

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That's been my experience too. It actually saves a lot of time figuring out how to make fancy graphs and sort/filter/pivot functions--I just make nice semantic HTML with <table>s of values. The users can point Excel at my URL and it'll automagically turn it into a spreadsheet they already know how to use.

One thing I haven't figured out how to do is have a link on my page that triggers an Excel HTML import operation on the current page.

Woah. That's cool.

www.excelmashup.com

... Yeah, that's what I was thinking of. Thanks!

ps. you should make the generated script tag do src="//r.office.microsoft.com/r/rlidExcelButton?v=1&kip=1" so the http/https issue in your FAQ goes away

will pass along , thanks!

The last time I've done this I just have a link that sets the content type header to something like text/excel (that's not it exactly i don't think, google for it) and on Windows at least it always worked to open the page in Excel. And if you use an HTML table, excel will just open it as a spreadsheet, including any CSS text formatting you use.

Is that what you meant, or did I answer a different question?

Unfortunately, Excel can't cope with some of the more modern authentication systems being deployed on the web, so it's no longer as easy as providing a URL that spits out an HTML table, if you have to protect sensitive data behind a login (I think it can handle HTTP-Basic, but not anything requiring redirects; this may have changed in recent versions).

Yep. Believe you also need to set something like this: Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="foo.xls"

It's "application/vnd.ms-excel" for recent versions.

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