How can I export tables to Excel from a webpage

Question

How can I export tables to Excel from a webpage  I want the export to contain all the formatting and colours

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Far and away  the cleanest  easiest export from tables to Excel is Jquery DataTables Table Tools plugin   You get a grid that sorts  filters  orders  and pages your data  and with just a few extra lines of code and two small files included  you get export to Excel  PDF  CSV  to clipboard and to the printer   This is all the code that s required       document  ready  function              example   dataTable             sDom    T lt  clear  gt lfrtip            oTableTools                  sSwfPath     swf copy cvs xls pdf swf                            So  quick to deploy  no browser limitations  no server-side language required  and most of all very EASY to understand   It s a win-win   The one thing it does have limits on  though  is strict formatting of columns   If formatting and colors are absolute dealbreakers  the only 100  reliable  cross browser method I ve found is to use a server-side language to process proper Excel files from your code   My solution of choice is PHPExcel  It is the only one I ve found so far that positively handles export with formatting to a MODERN version of Excel from any browser when you give it nothing but HTML   Let me clarify though  it s definitely not as easy as the first solution  and also is a bit of a resource hog   However  on the plus side it also can output direct to PDF as well   And  once you get it configured  it just works  every time   UPDATE - September 15  2016   TableTools has been discontinued in favor of a new plugin called  buttons   These tools perform the same functions as the old TableTools extension  but are FAR easier to install and they make use of HTML5 downloads for modern browsers  with the capability to fallback to the original Flash download for browsers that don t support the HTML5 standard   As you can see from the many comments since I posted this response in 2011  the main weakness of TableTools has been addressed   I still can t recommend DataTables enough for handling large amounts of data simply  both for the developer and the user

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mozilla still support base 64 URIs  This allows you to compose dynamically the binary content using javascript    lt a href  data application vnd ms-excel lt base64 encoded binary excel content here gt   gt  download xls lt  a gt    if your excel file is not very fancy  no diagrams  formulas  macroses  you can dig into the format and compose bytes for your file  then encode them with base64 and put in to the href  refer to https   developer mozilla org en data URIs

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This is a php but you maybe able to change it to javascript    lt  php gt   colgroup   str repeat   lt col width 86 gt   5    data        time   date  M d  y g ia     excel     lt html xmlns o   urn schemas-microsoft-com office office   xmlns x   urn schemas-microsoft-com office excel   xmlns   http   www w3 org TR REC-html40   gt   lt  DOCTYPE html PUBLIC   -  W3C  DTD XHTML 1 0 Transitional  EN     http   www w3 org TR xhtml1 DTD xhtml1-transitional dtd   gt   lt html gt   lt head gt   lt meta http-equiv   Content-type   content   text html charset utf-8     gt   lt style id   Classeur1 16681 Styles   gt   xl4566   color  red     lt  style gt   lt  head gt   lt body gt   lt div id   Classeur1 16681   align center x publishsource   Excel   gt   lt table x str border 0 cellpadding 0 cellspacing 0 style   border-collapse  collapse   gt   lt colgroup gt  colgroup lt  colgroup gt   lt tr gt  lt td class xl2216681 gt  lt b gt Col1 lt  b gt  lt  td gt  lt td class xl2216681 gt  lt b gt Col2 lt  b gt  lt  td gt  lt td class xl2216681  gt  lt b gt Col3 lt  b gt  lt  td gt  lt td class xl2216681  gt  lt b gt Col4 lt  b gt  lt  td gt  lt td class xl2216681  gt  lt b gt Col5 lt  b gt  lt  td gt  lt  tr gt   lt tr gt  lt td class xl4566 gt 1 lt  td gt  lt td gt 2 lt  td gt  lt td gt 3 lt  td gt  lt td gt 4 lt  td gt  lt td gt 5 lt  td gt  lt  tr gt   lt  table gt   lt  div gt   lt  body gt   lt  html gt       fname    Export  time     xls      file   fopen  fname  w       fwrite  file  excel     fclose  file     header  Content-Type  application vnd ms-excel      header  Content-Disposition  attachment  filename    basename  fname          readfile  fname     unlink  fname     gt

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A long time ago  I discovered that Excel would open an HTML file with a table if we send it with Excel content type  Consider the document above    lt  DOCTYPE html PUBLIC  -  W3C  DTD XHTML 1 0 Transitional  EN   http   www w3 org TR xhtml1 DTD xhtml1-transitional dtd  gt   lt html xmlns  http   www w3 org 1999 xhtml  gt   lt head gt     lt title gt Java Friends lt  title gt   lt  head gt   lt body gt     lt table style  font-weight  bold  gt       lt tr style  background-color red  gt  lt td gt a lt  td gt  lt td gt b lt  td gt  lt  tr gt       lt tr gt  lt td gt 1 lt  td gt  lt td gt 2 lt  td gt  lt  tr gt     lt  table gt       lt  body gt   lt  html gt    I ran the following bookmarklet on it   javascript window open  data application vnd ms-excel   document documentElement innerHTML     and in fact I got it downloadable as a Excel file  However  I did not get the expected result - the file was open in OpenOffice org Writer  That is my problem  I do not have Excel in this machine so I cannot try it better  Also  this trick worked more or less six years ago with older browsers and an antique version of MS Office  so I really cannot say if it will work today   Anyway  in the document above I added a button which would download the entire document as an Excel file  in theory    lt  DOCTYPE html PUBLIC  -  W3C  DTD XHTML 1 0 Transitional  EN   http   www w3 org TR xhtml1 DTD xhtml1-transitional dtd  gt   lt html xmlns  http   www w3 org 1999 xhtml  gt   lt head gt     lt title gt Java Friends lt  title gt   lt  head gt   lt body gt     lt table style  font-weight  bold  gt       lt tr style  background-color red  gt  lt td gt a lt  td gt  lt td gt b lt  td gt  lt  tr gt       lt tr gt  lt td gt 1 lt  td gt  lt td gt 2 lt  td gt  lt  tr gt       lt tr gt         lt td colspan  2  gt           lt button onclick  window open  data application vnd ms-excel   document documentElement innerHTML    gt              Get as Excel spreadsheet          lt  button gt         lt  td gt       lt  tr gt     lt  table gt       lt  body gt   lt  html gt    Save it in a file and click on the button  I d love to know if it worked or not  so I ask you to comment even for saying that it did not work

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Assumptions     given url the conversion has to be done on client side systems are Windows  Mac and linux   Solution for Windows   python code that open the ie window and has access to it  theurl variable contain the url   http       ie   Dispatch  InternetExplorer Application   ie Visible   1 ie Navigate theurl    Note  if the page is not accessible directly  but login  you will need to handle this by entering the form data and emulating the user actions with python  here is the example  from win32com client import Dispatch ie Document all  username   value usr ie Document all  password   value psw   the same manner for retrieval of data from web page  Let s say element with id  el1  contain the data   retrieve the element text to the variable  el1   ie Document all  el1   value   then when data is in python variable  you can open the excel screen in similar manner using python   from win32com client import Dispatch xlApp   Dispatch  Excel Application   xlWb   xlApp Workbooks Open  Read xls   xlSht   xlWb WorkSheets 1  xlSht Cells row  col  Value   el1   Solution for Mac   only the tip  use AppleScript - it has simple and similar API as win32com client Dispatch  Solution for Linux   java awt Robot might work for this it has click  key press  hot keys can be used   but none API for Linux that I am aware about that can work as  simple as AppleScript

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And now there is a better way   OpenXML SDK for JavaScript   https   openxmlsdkjs codeplex com

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Excel has a little known feature called  Web queries  which let you retrieve data from almost every web page without additional programming    A web query basicly runs a HTTP request directly from within Excel and copies some or all of the received data  and optionally formatting  into the worksheet    After you ve defined the web query you can refresh it at any time without even leaving excel  So you don t have to actually  export  data and save it to a file - you d rather refresh the data just like from a database   You can even make use of URL parameters by having excel prompt you for certain filter criteria etc     However the cons I ve noticed so far are    dynamicly loaded data is not accessible  because Javascript is not executed URL length is limited   Here is a question about how to create web queries in Excel  It links to a Microsoft Help site about How-To Get external data from a Web page

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It is possible to use the old Excel 2003 XML format  before OpenXML  to create a string that contains your desired XML  then on the client side you could use a data URI to open the file using the XSL mime type  or send the file to the client using the Excel mimetype  Content-Type  application vnd ms-excel  from the server side    Open Excel and create a worksheet with your desired formatting and colors  Save the Excel workbook as  XML Spreadsheet 2003    xml   Open the resulting file in a text editor like notepad and copy the value into a string in your application Assuming you use the client side approach with a data uri the code would look like this     lt script type  text javascript  gt  var worksheet template     lt  xml version  1 0   gt  lt ss Workbook xmlns ss  urn schemas-microsoft-com office spreadsheet  gt                   lt ss Styles gt  lt ss Style ss ID  1  gt  lt ss Font ss Bold  1   gt  lt  ss Style gt  lt  ss Styles gt  lt ss Worksheet ss Name  Sheet1  gt                   lt ss Table gt   ROWS   lt  ss Table gt  lt  ss Worksheet gt  lt  ss Workbook gt    var row template     lt ss Row ss StyleID  1  gt  lt ss Cell gt  lt ss Data ss Type  String  gt   name   lt  ss Data gt  lt  ss Cell gt  lt  ss Row gt     lt  script gt    Then you can use string replace to create a collection of rows to be inserted into your worksheet template    lt script type  text javascript  gt  var rows   document getElementById  my-table   getElementsByTagName  tr      row data       for  var i   0  length   rows length  i  lt  length    i    row data    row template replace    name     rows i  getElementsByTagName  td   0  innerHTML      lt  script gt    Once you have the information collected  create the final string and open a new window using the data URI    lt script type  text javascript  gt  var worksheet   worksheet template replace    ROWS     row data    window open  data application vnd ms-excel   worksheet    lt  script gt      It is worth noting that older browsers do not support the data URI scheme  so you may need to produce the file server side for those browser that do not support it   You may also need to perform base64 encoding on the data URI content  which may require a js library  as well as adding the string   base64  after the mime type in the data URI

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This is actually more simple than you d think   Just  copy the HTML table  that is  The HTML code for the table  into the clipboard  Excel knows how to decode HTML tables  it ll even try to preserve the attributes   The hard part is  copy the table into the clipboard  since there is no standard way to access the clipboard from JavaScript  See this blog post  Accessing the System Clipboard with JavaScript     A Holy Grail   Now all you need is the table as HTML  I suggest jQuery and the html   method

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There are practical two ways to do this automaticly while only one solution can be used in all browsers   First of all you should use the open xml specification to build the excel sheet  There are free plugins from Microsoft available that make this format also available for older office versions  The open xml is standard since office 2007  The the two ways are obvious the serverside or the clientside    The clientside implementation use a new standard of CSS that allow you to store data instead of just the URL to the data  This is a great approach coz you dont need any servercall  just the data and some javascript  The killing downside is that microsoft don t support all parts of it in the current IE  I don t know about IE9  releases  Microsoft restrict the data to be a image but we will need a document  In firefox it works quite fine  For me the IE was the killing point    The other way is to user a serverside implementation  There should be a lot implementations of open XML for all languages  You just need to grap one  In most cases it will be the simplest way to modify a Viewmodel to result in a Document but for sure you can send all data from Clientside back to server and do the same

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First  I would not recommend trying export Html and hope that the user s instance of Excel picks it up  My experience that this solution is fraught with problems including incompatibilities with Macintosh clients and throwing an error to the user that the file in question is not of the format specified  The most bullet-proof  user-friendly solution is a server-side one where you use a library to build an actual Excel file and send that back to the user  The next best solution and more universal solution would be to use the Open XML format  I ve run into a few rare compatibility issues with older versions of Excel but on the whole this should give you a solution that will work on any version of Excel including Macs   Open XML

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simple google search turned up this      If the data is actually an HTML page and has NOT been created by ASP  PHP  or some other scripting language  and you are using Internet Explorer 6  and you have Excel installed on your computer  simply right-click on the page and look through the menu  You should see  Export to Microsoft Excel   If all these conditions are true  click on the menu item and after a few prompts it will be imported to Excel     if you can t do that  he gives an alternate  drag-and-drop  method   http   www mrkent com tools converter

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This code is IE only so it is only useful in situations where you know all of your users will be using IE  like  for example  in some corporate environments     lt script Language  javascript  gt  function ExportHTMLTableToExcel        var thisTable   document getElementById  tbl   innerHTML     window clipboardData setData  Text   thisTable      var objExcel   new ActiveXObject   Excel Application       objExcel visible   true      var objWorkbook   objExcel Workbooks Add     var objWorksheet   objWorkbook Worksheets 1      objWorksheet Paste     lt  script gt

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function normalexport             try              var i             var j             var mycell             var tableID    tblInnerHTML              var drop   document getElementById   lt    ddl sections ClientID   gt                var objXL   new ActiveXObject  Excel Application               var objWB   objXL Workbooks Add               var objWS   objWB ActiveSheet             var str   filterNum drop options drop selectedIndex  text              objWB worksheets  Sheet1   activate    activate dirst worksheet            var XlSheet   objWB activeSheet    activate sheet            XlSheet Name   str    rename              for  i   0  i  lt  document getElementById  ctl00 ContentPlaceHolder1 1   rows length - 1  i                     for  j   0  j  lt  document getElementById  ctl00 ContentPlaceHolder1 1   rows i  cells length  j                         mycell   document getElementById  ctl00 ContentPlaceHolder1 1   rows i  cells j                       objWS Cells i   1  j   1  Value   mycell innerText                                                                        objWS Cells i   1  j   1  style backgroundColor   mycell style backgroundColor                                            objWS Range  A1    L1   Font Bold   true                               objWS Range  A1    L1   Font ColorIndex   2                                objWS Range  A1    Z1   Interior ColorIndex   47              objWS Range  A1    Z1   EntireColumn AutoFit                  objWS Range  C1    C1   ColumnWidth   50              objXL Visible   true            catch  err               alert  Error  Scripting for ActiveX might be disabled              return                 idTmr   window setInterval  Cleanup      1              function filterNum str            return str replace        g

[javascript] How can I export tables to Excel from a webpage

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