Like you, I cannot get MS Office Web Components to work. I would not consider Google Docs since Google seems to think they own anything that passes through their hands. I have tried MS Publish Objects but the quality of the generated html/css is truely awful.
The secret of converting an Excel worksheet to html that will display correctly on a smartphone is to create clean, lean html/css.
The structure of the HTML is:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
HEAD
</head>
<body>
BODY
</body>
</html>
There are useful html elements that can replace "HEAD" but it is not clear to me how you would generate them from an Excel worksheet. They would need to be added separately.
The obvious output for a worksheet or a range is an html table so the following assumes BODY will be replaced by an html table.
The structure of an html table is:
<table TABLE-ATTRIBUTES>
<tr TABLE-ROW-ATTRIBUTES>
<td TABLE-CELL-ATTRIBUTES>CELL-VALUE</td>
More <td>...</td> elements as necessary
</tr>
More <tr>...</tr> as necessary
</table>
Include as few TABLE-ATTRIBUTES, TABLE-ROW-ATTRIBUTES and TABLE-CELL-ATTRIBUTES as possible. Do not set column widths in pixels. Use css attributes rather than html attributes.
A table attribute worth considering is style = "border-collapse: collapse;"
. The default is separate
with a gap around each cell. With collapse
the cells touch as they do with Excel.
Three table attribute worth considering are style="background-color:aliceblue;"
, style="color:#0000FF;"
and style="text-align:right;"
. With the first, you can specify the background colour to be any of the fifty or so named html colours. With the second, you can specify the font colour to be any of 256*256*256 colours. With the third you can right-align numeric values.
The above covers only a fraction of the formatting information that could be converted from Excel to html/css. I am developing an add-in that will convert as much Excel formatting as possible but I hope the above helps anyone with simple requirements.