Saving Excel as A Web Page looks sooooo Ugly! Help!

July 11, 2007 10:28 AM

I need to get a nice looking excel sheet published to the web daily. The problem: if I "save as web page" from excel it doesn't look so nice anymore as excel doesn't translate its formatting well at all, but if I were to take a screen shot and publish it as an image I lose the embedded links. What to do?

So I want to publish my little spreadsheet daily. In excel it is a thing of beauty! (As far as spreadsheets can be.) I have vertical text, and everything is spaced nicely. The data itself has about 100 items in the various columns. Each data line (all 100 in other words) links to a separate web page with details of that unit. Each day the location of the data lines change, although the names don't. So, if I could use excel's "save as a web page" it would be great, because that keeps the links working perfectly no matter what location they end up in on different days.

The problem is that saving as a web page causes excel to totally mess up my formatting. There seems to be no way to keep vertical text vertical and other bad translation problems. Is there any good way to meet both my needs:

(1) Have the output look nice like it does natively in excel
(2) Have the links work as they do if I save my excel spreadsheet as a webpage

Thanks if anyone has any ideas!

posted by TweetleBeetleBattleBookie to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Try exporting as a PDF or as FlashPaper (with Adobe Acrobat Pro, or FlashPaper, or CutePDF, etc). I'm not sure, but one of those might preserve the links. But the formatting that Excel supports was not developed with the web in mind, and the "Save to Web Option" in all M$ products... sucks.

Oh, and if OpenOffice can import it, it can probably also export to a nice PDF with links.
posted by tmcw at 10:37 AM on July 11, 2007

Whenever I did this at my last job, I'd output the excel file as a tab-delimited text file and run that file through a perl script that plugged the data into an html template.

I'm not sure if that would break your embedded links, though.
posted by Crosius at 11:24 AM on July 11, 2007

Oh, and Google Docs probably has a great export. But, vertical text? I don't quite understand what that is and I know that if it's text, vertically aligned, it will not translate into HTML
posted by tmcw at 11:33 AM on July 11, 2007

CSV export will work too. If you export it to a database, it is easy to configure a PHP template for displaying the info.
posted by JJ86 at 11:48 AM on July 11, 2007

I second tmcw for exporting it to a PDF. You can use a free print driver such as PDFCreator to convert in Excel.
posted by parttimeninja at 12:12 PM on July 11, 2007

The problem is that Excel is a nice data handling/manipulating/displaying tool, but an awful Web authoring tool. The fact that it will save in HTML is mostly a cruel joke on M$'s part, cos as you're discovering, it's about useless.

So, from my perspective as a web programmer, the best solution is to treat your Excel spreadsheet as a data-gathering tool, but not as a display-creating tool.

(Warning - the following is what i think is the best solution, but it's probably not the simple solution you were after. But maybe you can get help implementing this, if you think it would be worth it)

I would do the following in your situation:

- design a sample online "spreadsheet" layout using a Web editor (Dreamweaver, etc)
- redesign your Excel spreadsheet just to collect and organise what you want to display
- * write server-side code that will take your uploaded spreadsheet and render it as per the beautiful HTML layout sample you created

If you can do all this, or arrange for it to be done, your daily task would be limited to updating the spreadsheet, renaming it and uploading it, and the server-side code would automatically render the new data in the desired format. Yes, including links.

(* Obviously this is the geeky step. It would be relatively easy to do in ASP.NET, but quite possible in Java or PHP. A couple PHP-Excel solutions can be found here and here )
posted by Artful Codger at 1:49 PM on July 11, 2007

Vertical text isn't going to work well in HTML. If you want HTML, and you can't make things fit right any other way, you'll probably want to make GIF images of the vertical labels and use those. It would probably be better if you could make the layout work without vertical text, though.
posted by amtho at 3:44 PM on July 11, 2007

Does is have to open in the browser? If you can assume that your readers will have Excel, or even some other application that will open Excel docs, you could just publish the spreadsheet itself. Just upload it to the web server and link to it, and the browser will ask them what they want to open it with.
posted by bricoleur at 3:53 PM on July 11, 2007