Did you know that Excel can open a plain-old HTML table file and treat it just like a native Microsoft XLS file?<\/p>\n
I’ve been doing this for ages, and its quite simple to pull off; just name your file something.xls and send the html with the content-type of “application\/vnd.ms-excel” (and even that is not strictly required).<\/p>\n
Even functions are somewhat supported like so.<\/p>\n
<table>\n <tr>\n <td>2<\/td>\n <td>3<\/td>\n <td>=sum(a1:b1)<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n<\/table><\/code><\/pre>\nHowever, there are a few drawbacks to this worth sharing when trying to style the tables with CSS.<\/p>\n
1) Multiple class names are not supported:<\/p>\n
<style type='text\/css'>\n td.foo { background-color: red; }\n<\/style>\n<td class='foo bar'><\/td><\/pre>\n<\/code><\/p>\n
Will not apply the background color. You have to use only a single class per element like so:<\/p>\n
<style type='text\/css'>\n td.foo { background-color: red; }\n<\/style>\n<td class='foo'><\/td><\/code><\/pre>\n2) Descendant selectors are not supported:<\/p>\n
<style type='text\/css'>\n tr.odd td { background-color: red; }\n<\/style>\n<tr class='odd'>\n <td><\/td>\n<\/tr><\/code><\/pre>\nWill not apply the background color either. You will have to be very specific about the element you want to style.<\/p>\n
3) Certain colors and properties don't work:
\nIf you use a color like #ECECEC (a light gray), it will come out white, If you use #CCCCCC (a darker gray) it will work. Stick to the basics like #000000 (black) if you can.<\/p>\n
4) You'll have to add your styles either inline or in an html <style> block.
\nThis shouldn't come as a surprise, but linking to an external stylesheet won't work. Excel won't reach out to your server to style the content.<\/p>\n
5) Granularity will not be easily achieved:
\nStyling something with a 1px border is going to translate into a .5pt border. That's just how Excel rolls I guess.<\/p>\n
Try marking up an Excel workbook and using 'save as' -> 'html' and opening up the file to checkout the markup Excel uses. This can give you some clues to what is acceptable.<\/p>\n
I hope these simple tips help someone in a similar situation, and keep them from using a heavy arcane library to generate excel files with some added styling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Did you know that Excel can open a plain-old HTML table file and treat it just like a native Microsoft XLS file? I’ve been doing this for ages, and its quite simple to pull off; just name your file something.xls and send the html with the content-type of “application\/vnd.ms-excel” (and even that is not strictly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[24,25,26,45],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unixmonkey.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unixmonkey.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unixmonkey.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unixmonkey.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unixmonkey.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/unixmonkey.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unixmonkey.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unixmonkey.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unixmonkey.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}