Re: export to excel format

On Thu, Apr 10, 2003 at 23:35:03 -0700, Faizol Halim <faizol_h@yahoo.com> wrote:
> hi all,
>  first of all, I'm sorry if this is not the right
> place to ask (if so, where should I direct the
> question to?)
>  my question:
>  is there anyway that I could export some of my tables
> to an excel format..? any module or pointers on how
> this could be done..?

If you output data as tab separated text files it will be very easy to
import the data into excel.
For a project I have where people that communicate with me use Windows
and excel is useful for combining different sets of data (so that
scripts can handle hundreds of similar data sets). To provide a way for
them to get data back to me I wrote a perl program that gets data from
the database and writes excel spreadsheets. It uses Spreadsheet::WriteExcel
which you can get from CPAN. It seems to be pretty slow. It takes about
3 minutes to produce a 4MB spreadsheet.
If you want to see the example to decide if it is something that might be
useful to you, you can look at:
http://wolff.to/area/excel.pl
A good chunk of the program is for handling the web part of things as the
sheets get generated on the fly (snail might be a better word) to satisfy 
web requests.