Excel & ASP

This simple ASP/VBScript code sample shows how you can export data from a database table to a CSV file without using any components or database drivers. The script accesses the table through an ADODB Recordset object, converts the values into the CSV format and sends the data to the browser along with appropriate response headers. This code should be saved as an ASP script on a webserver. You should see an "Open/Save As..." dialog when you access the script through a web browser.

Generating Excel files from web pages or other applications is a major subject in many articles. I'd like to present here some solutions, part of them, already presented and well known. Some of them require MS Excel to be installed on the server, and other not. Read here a few solutions.

ASP form input can be transformed into most any type of format that you'd like to see it in. Typically, most form input either gets delivered to a database, like Access or SQL server or the output is sent to an email address or some other application. This example will show you how to take user input and create an excel file of that input on the server. The title that the user inputs will be used to name the document. When utilizing this script on your site please keep in mind that the directory that you execute the .asp code from must have user write authority established on the server.

This code example demonstrates how to create excel documents on your server. Using the US state info db, after reading the contents of the db instead of writing output to the browser, html text is written to the server with the .xls file extension. A link to the new document is created (in the browser) for easy navigation to the new document. The current time (server time) is also displayed to show that the excel document was created dynamically.

This article shows how to use an Excel file as the database for an employee photo directory. As part of the Active Server Pages application it explains how to configure the spreadsheet for online use, create recordsets from the rows of data, and perform queries and navigate using a browser.

The author writes "For small data bits on a server where the chance for significant simultaneous traffic is not likely excel can perform many of the basic tasks that can be accomplished in Access or SQL Server, but on a much smaller scale." This exmaple code demonstrates how to display data from Excel using sample data of Hank Greenberg's career statistics. Example code available for download.

This article describes using the Office Web Components (OWC) to create an Excel spreadsheet via ASP code based on the results from a database query. All of this complexity is encapsulated in a (rather basic) class.

This tutorial shows a quick and easy way to generate Excel reports using just ASP. It allows the server to dynamically create Excel reports without taking up any space on the server, and also allows multiple concurrent users to receive these reports simultaneously. The generated reports can be complete with Excel formulas, which allows intensive calculations to be moved to the client side. This method only works with Excel 97 or later.

This is a short example showing how to bring data from Access to excel where further manipulation can take place.