Alan Knowleshas a new posting over on his blog today about one of his "pet" projects - Generating excel, again..

One of my on-going projects, that has been dragging on longer than I would of liked is a shipping management application. I think it's mentioned in the archives, but for anyone who missed it, it is a mid sized XUL application which deals primarily with the management of a trading companies shipping requirements. I originally outsourced the main development, and have been tidying up and refining the code as we near final deployment (which as usual has taken longer than expected.)

He gives an example of how he starts with a template, loads it, adds data to the cells (using javascript), and finally outputs the HTML with some extra namespace attributes picked up by the javascript. Then it's run through a script that runs the Spreadsheet Writer library on it to dump out an nice, clean, new Excel file...