

Ask HN: report system, Excel or HTML? - jacktang

Hi Developers &#38; Designers<p>I am a Rubist and now working on one report system, and decided to using excel(and template) to build the report, I chose the excel template because of two:<p>1. let the end user design the report by excel
2. let end user print the report in excel<p>but the problem is that it is hard to deal with the report with huge data, and now I want to choose raw HTML, the long report can be easy handled by adding pagination. And do you know any clean HTML report available on www?<p>Thanks!
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jwallz
You need to do both. dump the report to a page in html with pagination and
have an export to excel button. For file export do it as tab delimited with a
.xls extension.

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nailer
What specifically is the problem? Are you likely to have more than 65K rows?

If not, Python's xlwt and xlrd modules handle support for native Excel in a
very simple, OO, pythonic way, without any scary Windows or COM shit. I
regularly generate and parse pretty big Excel files most days so I'd be happy
to answer any questions.

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clscott
If you render the report as an HTML document and serve it with a mime-type of
application/vnd.ms-excel the users system will prompt them open it in excel.

Excel will parse it with all of the nice formatting and everything!

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jacktang
thanks, clscott. I will try it

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yannis
For reports (people like to print them), I normally use

(a) pdf (b) HTML

In that order!

If anyone needs excel I give them comma delimited for import!

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michael_dorfman
A nice hack: if you give them comma delimited, but name the file ".xls", Excel
will silently import it. and they'll never know the difference.

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nfnaaron
Years ago I submitted a resume to an HR dept. It was plain text, with a .txt
extension.

They said "we only accept Word files for resumes."

So I changed the .txt extension to .doc and resubmitted it.

I got the job.

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wendroid
Like choosing which bullet to get shot by.

