Save data from Excel/Office diretcly to webserver, like MS Sharepoint

[Stefan_K_]

How can one get Excel to save data back to a webserver, like MS Sharepoint?

Excel-Exports & Imports have always been an issue over the years and I've been doing a lot of research lately.
So I know about JExcelAPI, POI, Excel-XML, parsing large XML with StaX, outputting Excel-XML, etc.

The final goal is to provide interaction with MS Office like MS Sharepoint:
- Open files in Excel and save them back to the sharepoint-website.
- Provide data in Excel-Form and save it back to Sharepoint.

Basically using Excel as frontend.
By now I know different ways to send the clients data in true Excel-Form, but can't get Excel to save the data back to some Webserver.

Anyone know how this could be done?
Can it be done with "Web queries", or are they only for sending data to Excel, not receiving from?

[Guest]

Consider making the Excel spreadsheet a datasource. That way, you can save an updated spreadsheet, run your ColdFusion app and query the spreadsheet.

[Stefan_K_]

Sorry, but I'm talking about client-side Excel. When saving, it opens the save-to dialogue and shows the webserver-location.

We tried using Excel as ODBC-datasource, never again ... Excel guesses the datatype of columns by scanning the first 20 rows ...the 20 is adjustable but still not usable for us.

[Stefan_K_]

*bump*
Ideas, questions, solutions, popcorn anyone?

[Guest]

I've never used MS Sharepoint but are you talking about something like this...

http://www.google.com/googlespreadsheets/tour1.html

If you do find a freeware, please let us know!


I guess one alternative might be to have your users make their changes locally
and then upload their changes to the webserver. You would then write code
to read/parse/datasource/etc this .xls. Or you could leave it as is and the next
time someone wants the file, send them the version that was uploaded last.

I know it's a really ugly hack so please respond back with how you settled on
the problem.


Good luck!