How to make spreadsheet dynamically sortable web table?

April 26, 2008 9:01 AM

I want to take an Excel spreadsheet and just make it a dynamically sortable table I can put in a webpage or blog. I want people to be able to click a column, and have the table be sorted by that column. Best solutions? Also, if the table included locations, is it possible to make them selectable, and have the selected locations display on Google maps? Thanks.
posted by Malad to computers & internet (5 answers total)

You might be able to import the spreadsheet as a Google Spreadsheet, and then embed the spreadsheet into a webpage, but I'm not sure.
posted by Maia at 9:05 AM on April 26, 2008

What Maia said, only I'm sure of it. :)
posted by unixrat at 9:24 AM on April 26, 2008

You can do this in Excel 2003 for Windows (it may not work with Mac Excel or the new version of Excel for Windows).

Suppose your table looks this in Excel:

....A....................B.............
1 Name..........Location
2 City Hall......123 Any street
3 Land Fill......123 Rural Road


For the locations you could create hyperlinks to the relevant google map pages. For example, you would highlight cell B2 and then Insert --> hyperlink and then copy in the google map link.

Once you’ve created your hyperlinks, you highlight the entire area A1:B3 and then go file --> Save as webpage and click on the save selection button and click on the add interactivity button, and then press the publish button.

If you double click on the .htm file that is created, it will open into a web browser (I’m using Internet Explorer) and then it might ask you about allowing active X to run (allow it), and you’ll end up with an interactive web page that has icons that allow for sorting the table.
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear at 9:30 AM on April 26, 2008

Does it HAVE to be Excel? Because here are 16 options.
posted by desjardins at 10:51 AM on April 26, 2008

Is the Excel file just the source of the data to be displayed or does it need to be updatable through the web as well?

It is possible to read from an Excel document using PHP and the PHP-ExcelReader. This would involve some programming though. You could read the Excel into arrays in PHP and from there it would be quite easy to sort them as necessary and make the links. If the server where the site is hosted is a Windows server there are also other options using COM objects.
posted by Gomez_in_the_South at 4:28 PM on April 26, 2008