Read Excel data with JQuery

Question

I would like to know how to read data from a multi-worksheet MS Excel 2003 file using nothing, but jquery. I have read several solutions for PHP/JQuery, ActiveX, etc..., but I would like to do it with JQuery ONLY. Any idea of how this could work?

I have found http://plugins.jquery.com/project/csv2table and this does the job almost perfectly, except for the fact that I have to break each sheet out into a CSV file. I would like to drop that step and read it directly from the Excel file. Thank you in advance for your help!

BTW - I am working in FireFox 4 and have no need for cross browser support.

Answer 1

Office Web Components provide an api to excel documents via javascript (or vb). They are poorly documented but for intranet type applications they can get the job done. I have used them for the pivot table functionality in IE6 and do not know if it will work with Firefox.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Web_Components

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=beb5d477-2100-4586-a13c-50e56f101720&DisplayLang=en

Answer 2

Actually it's possible without OWC and such exotic addins, but manual work will be required. Another thing - it's doable on local machine only - don't expect your worksheet to act like a web server. Another possibility is to set it up on a network share, but I'm not sure how will it all work in the sandbox.

EDIT: I know the question was about Excel 2003 format. However, there are still Google queries about the same functionality and today people are using MS Office versions 2010/2013. So, I believe the answer can be beneficial to the reader.

So, here it is:

1. Using zip.js you can open zipped files. This means you can open MS Office files starting from Office 2007 (.docx, .xlsx. etc). Older office files have custom format and you can't read them as zipped files.
2. After you open the file, hierarchical folder structure with various files in it is available. The data itself is in /xl/worksheets/[worksheet name].xml and /xl/sharedStrings.xml, which means you have to dig it out using XML parser and correlate afterwards.
3. Luckily enough, XML parser is available in jQuery: $.parseXML('...')

Have fun ;)