Excel Without Excel

Hi All,
 
I was wondering if anyone knew any tricks or could provide me links to creating Excel applications without having Excel on the computer?
 
Basically, I want to have a server compile information, write it to an excel file, and email it to me without wasting a license of Microsoft Office on that server.  Is this possible?
 
Let me rephrase...is this possible without using Open Office?
 
Thanks in advance.

Why not use powershell and export whatever you need as a CSV. That's how I do most everything these days.

If the excel file were for me, I would say that's acceptable.  Unfortunately, this will be emailed to my accounting department and they need colors, titles, merged cells, bla, bla, bla.
 
So...it needs to be an xls file with proper formatting.

Hmmm...I'm pretty sure that Open Office does expose an API, but I've never worked with it.

I don't think there's a reasonable way to script creation of (formatted) Excel files without having Excel. I don't have that much experience with (Libre|Neo|Open)Office from an automation PoV, but judging from a quick glance it doesn't look like they integrate as well as Excel with VBS.
 
Perhaps you could hand-craft .xlsx files, since they're a bunch of XML files in a zip archive. However, that's probably the most painful approach aside from manually carving the bits into the disk.

While it seems silly to want to use Excel professionally (you mentioned accountants) without installing/paying for it, you could use Perl & WriteExcel
http://search.cpan.org/di./Spreadsheet-WriteExcel/
 

Do they do anything with this sheet other than look at the data on it?  If not you could created XSLT template files and export the data to XML and have the XSLT file structure the XML in a nice format that is readable by a web browser.

TaterTot


Hi All,

I was wondering if anyone knew any tricks or could provide me links to creating Excel applications without having Excel on the computer?

Basically, I want to have a server compile information, write it to an excel file, and email it to me without wasting a license of Microsoft Office on that server.  Is this possible?

Let me rephrase...is this possible without using Open Office?

Thanks in advance.

 
I had to do this a few years ago. Maybe the code will still work with some effort:
 
http://www.visualbasicscript.com/tm.aspx?m=71130

Thank you everyone for your replies.
 
I think I'll venture down the XML road mentioned by 59cobalt, Wakawaka, and TNO (thanks for the link TNO).  If I get a solution working in a reasonable amount of time I will update this thread with my code.
 
@ehvbs: I should included the words "legally" and "staying in compliance" in my question.  I'm not trying to figure out a loophole through Microsoft's licensing (that would require a PHD).  I was just curious if my question is possible to do so I can run this code on a server and not my workstation (which is properly licensed with Microsoft Office).
 
Thanks again.