How to produce multi-sheet excel output with XSLT

Hi all,

What library can I use to produce multi-sheet excel output with XSLT ?

Thanks

xslt is for producing text, not binary output. You need to use a library like Apache POI.

But isn't POI for producing Excel like :

Workbook w = new Workbook();
Cell c = new Cell();

ie creating excel files from Java?

Isn't there some way to specify that the output of my xsl can be excel format..in the same way that you can produce a pdf with xsl-fo?

Duran Harris wrote:Isn't there some way to specify that the output of my xsl can be excel format..in the same way that you can produce a pdf with xsl-fo?

No.

Okay but I found this post on StackOverflow that seems to be doing what I want? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2160159/create-excel-speadsheetml-output-with-xslt

If it does what you need done - great! But it sure doesn't create an Excel file. (And SpreadsheetML is obsolete to begin with.)

Have you considered creating a CSV file? All versions of Excel can import those.

You say that it doesn't create an excel file...I was under the impression that the spreadsheetML would be able to be opened as an excel spreadsheet?

A csv would be great except for the fact that I need multiple sheets...I dont need formulas or anything else like that,
I just need my data on multiple sheets.. would spreadsheetML output not do this properly?

Duran Harris wrote:I was under the impression that the spreadsheetML would be able to be opened as an excel spreadsheet?

Seems to me that it shouldn't be hard to set up a test which would answer that question...

Yes I ran the xml and xsl through the org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process class and was rewarded with some spreadsheetML...
But if I try open it with Open Office as a spreadsheet it opens Open Office Writer with the text content instead although
I did save the output of the transformation as .xls ...
Maybe I should spend a couple weeks figuring out this xsl stuff before I waste more time on this.

I don't think there ever was an application besides MS Office that could make sense of the Office 2003 XML formats. This has nothing to do with XSLT.

Okay I think I'll give up on this one for the time being..
Although Open Office Calc 2.0 does have the option of "Excel 2003 XML *.xml" in it's file open dialog...This gave me the wrong idea