Create Excel .xls files with ASP

by admin on July 24, 2009 · 0 comments

I used to work on a web application that tracked hardware inventory. I was requested to build a feature into the report page to be able to export to Excel (.xls) format.

Initially I looked into the code to instantiate a new spreadsheet object, and build the rows and cells one by one programatically. But I found a much simpler solution.

1. Create your report in HTML table format the same as you would your report page.
2. Strip out any header/footer info from the page, everything except the table.
3. Insert this line of code in the ASP header:

<% response.ContentType ="application/x-excel" %>

The table will be produced in HTML by the ASP server the same as it would on the report page. However, the returned content type is marked as .xls, so it will open in Excel as a spreadsheet!

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