<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;">Hi there,<div><br></div><div>Another option is to serve a plain html table from your web app and use Excel webqueries [1] to pull in the data from Excell. You can serve a (static) excel file with the webquery embedded and have it pull in the data rather than trying to generate an excel yourself.</div><div><br></div><div>We also had the best results generating spreadsheetML (which is the solution Tobias proposes).</div><div><br></div><div>If you serve csv, be aware that excell does not treat this very well on all platforms. We tried all that a couple of years ago and finally found that only a CSV in UTF16 format which uses tabs as separator (not commas) is read by excell on all platforms [2,3]</div><div><br></div><div>Also, the trick to just put the extension ‘xls’ to a csv file only works if the mime type was defined on the client computer. It does not work everywhere and can break at any time.</div><div><br></div><div>cheers,</div><div>Johan</div><div><br></div><div>[1] <a href="http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/get-and-analyze-data-from-the-web-in-excel-HA001054848.aspx">http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/get-and-analyze-data-from-the-web-in-excel-HA001054848.aspx</a></div><div>[2] <a href="http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2009/09/exporting-data-to-csv-and-excel-in-your-rails-app/">http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2009/09/exporting-data-to-csv-and-excel-in-your-rails-app/</a></div><div>[3] <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6588068/which-encoding-opens-csv-files-correctly-with-excel-on-both-mac-and-windows">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6588068/which-encoding-opens-csv-files-correctly-with-excel-on-both-mac-and-windows</a></div><div><br><div><blockquote type="cite"><div style="font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><blockquote type="cite">On 31.01.2014, at 16:10, Esteban A. Maringolo <<a href="mailto:emaringolo@gmail.com">emaringolo@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><br><blockquote type="cite">I need to download the contents of a html table generated with Seaside as a file (actually the whole contents if the table is paginated).<br><br>I wonder if somebody already implemented the feature to generate an Excel file programatically?<br><br>I'm using CSV files, but the customer prefers Excel (it can be XLSX).<br><br>Any thoughts? Command line converters? (linux)<br></blockquote></blockquote></div></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>