I use the script below, which uses the excellent Spreadsheet::ParseExcel package (available through ppm) on my web server to render Excel spreadsheets to my intranet. It does a much better job than MS-Office, because it produces clean HTML, and can be customised heavily to effectively use the spreadsheets as the database to drive customised web pages.

The parameters to the script are excelFile=xx.xls, where xx.xls resides in the c:/inetpub/wwwroot/ directory on an IIS server.

#!d:\perl\bin\perl.exe

use strict;
use Time::gmtime;
use CGI qw(:standard);
use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;

my $excelFile='c:/inetpub/wwwroot/' . param('excelFile');
my $title=$excelFile;

my $oExcel = new Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;
my $oBook = $oExcel->Parse($excelFile);
my($iR, $iC, $oWkS, $oWkC);

printHeader();
printBody();

sub printSpreadsheet()
{
    my $startpage = 0;

    print "<h1>FILE  :", $oBook->{File} , "<h1>\n";

    for(my $iSheet=0; 
        $iSheet < $oBook->{SheetCount} ; 
        $iSheet++) {

        $oWkS = $oBook->{Worksheet}[$iSheet];
        if($oBook->{SheetCount} gt 1)
        {
            print h1($oWkS->{Name});
        }
        print "<table border=0 cellpadding=1 width=100% ";
        print "BGCOLOR='#808080' width=100%>\n";
        for(my $iR = $oWkS->{MinRow} ;
            defined $oWkS->{MaxRow} && $iR <= $oWkS->{MaxRow} ; $iR++)
+ {
            print "<tr>\n";
            for(my $iC = $oWkS->{MinCol} ;
                defined $oWkS->{MaxCol} && $iC <= $oWkS->{MaxCol} ; 
                $iC++) {
                $oWkC = $oWkS->{Cells}[$iR][$iC];
                if($oWkC)
                {
                    print "<td bgcolor=\'";
                    print $oExcel->ColorIdxToRGB($oWkC->{Format}->{Fil
+l}[1]),"\'>\n";
                    if ($iR eq 0 or $iC eq 0)
                    {
                        print "<b>";
                    }
                    if ($oWkC->Value ne '')
                    {
                        print toHtml($oWkC->Value), "\n";
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        print "&nbsp;";
                    }
                    if($iC == 2 && $iR gt 1)
                    {
                        print "</a>";
                    }
                    print "</td>\n";
                }
                else
                {
                    print "<td bgcolor='#C9C7BA'>&nbsp;</td>\n";
                }
            }
            print "</tr>\n";
        }
        print "</table>\n";
    }
}

#########################################################

sub printHeader
{
    print "Content-type:text/html\n\n";
    print "<html><head>\n";
    print "<title>", $title, "</title>";
    print "<LINK rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' ";
    print "href='http://localhost/styles.css'>\n";
    print "<SCRIPT language=JavaScript>\n";
    print "    function linkURL(thisURL)\n";
    print "    { \n";
    print "      var re = / /g;\n";
    print "      var newThisURL = thisURL.replace(re, \"%20\"); \n";
    print "      window.location =newThisURL; \n";
    print "    }\n";
    print "</SCRIPT>\n";
    print "</head>\n";
    print "<body bgcolor='#FFFFFF'>\n";
}

#########################################################

sub printBody()
{
    printSpreadsheet();
    print "x</body>\n";
    print "</html>\n";
}

#########################################################

sub toHtml()
{
    local ($_) = @_;

    s/&/&amp;/g;
    s/>/&gt;/g;
    s/</&lt;/g;
    # etc...
    return $_;
}

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In reply to Rendering Clean MS-Excel Spreadsheets to a Browser by emarsee

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