CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phphtmlexceljscript
Adrian Brown
Adrian Brown

Reputation: 73

HTML with JScript to read/write XLS file

Very sorry if this is not in the right place etc. I have been researching this for a while but its raised more questions!

I have developed a spreadsheet which I use to set a teams duties for a shift. There are 5 teams, each with staff which can change day to day.

the spreadsheet works fine, but its too complicated for some users. I am therefore trying to develop a straightforward web based form.

All the data is on the spreadsheet, held on a network drive (essentially locally).

I need to be able to have several combo/select boxes which get their values from a range of cells from the XLS. Along with the ability to output the final selections to a XLS sheet.

Finally, it needs to be able to load the previous day values on load.

What is the best way of developing a web page for this? Is Jscript the best option? Can I access a local file with jScript?

Thanks in advance

Adrian

Upvotes: 1

Views: 400

Answers (1)

arkoak
arkoak

Reputation: 2497

The easiest option for you is to use google web forms. These allow creation of forms that will submit data to a google spreadsheet. Which is essentially an uploaded version of your local spreadsheet and can be downloaded to excel.

In case if you want more control and programming, pure javascript cant play with files, you need server side too. Javascript is not necessary unless you want to make your app do some visually fancy stuff. Since you mentioned php as a tag of this question, it seems you are a bit familiar with php. The task you have mentioned can be done using php programming as below:

  • Read excel file using an excel plugin
  • Parse relevant data using a text matching function, may require regular expressions knowledge.
  • display the form by building up the html and putting in the variables using the data obtained above.
  • Write a method to save the data submitted by the form to the same excel file using the excel plugin.

As its not convenient to play around with excel files. A better option would be to generate csv file or use a database using a database class . csv files can be parsed easily using text.

Upvotes: 1

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