Office 2003 XML

Creating XML Spreadsheets

There are two basic routes to creating a SpreadsheetML document. The first route is perhaps best described as “start from scratch,” where you assemble a spreadsheet using the XML vocabulary. The other route uses Excel to build a template for the spreadsheets you create, accepting a certain amount of overhead for the convenience of using a familiar GUI (rather than a collection of XML parts) to create a spreadsheet. In general, especially where styles are involved, I strongly recommend using Excel to generate an initial SpreadsheetML file you can use as a model.

Whichever approach you choose, you don’t need to provide as much information in your SpreadsheetML as Excel provides when you save information out. Most of the metadata can be discarded, and Excel can also reconstruct named ranges if necessary from the NamedCell elements inside of cells. Some data, like the ss:ExpandedColumnCount and ss:ExpandedRowCount attributes on the Table element, may actually be better left out, as it takes extra effort to generate and may produce errors when the spreadsheet is loaded if it’s wrong. For the most part, you’ll want to focus on creating the basic row and cell structures, along with styles.

You can use whatever tool you like to generate SpreadsheetML. XSLT, Java, C#, PHP, Perl, Python, Visual Basic, and many more will all work perfectly well. For complex spreadsheets with a lot of cross-references, I recommend working in whatever environment you’re most comfortable ...