On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, George Vieira wrote:
> I have a script which runs in a CGI and outputs a CVS type file. The content
> type is for an Exel spreadsheet and it seems to load up on the clietn
> browser but Exel loads up the CVS data as 1 cell for line instead of
> splitting the cells into columns.
>
> Have I got the wrong content type for IE or something?
The only way I have got this to work is to use a content type of
application/vnd.ms-excel
This will get excel to load the file on most versions. However I could
never get Excel to interpret CSV files without prompting for an import and
thus having to set delimiters manually etc. The way to overcome this is to
create a "DIF" or Document Interchange Format file. Excel can read these
okay, its a fomrmat the defines cells of data using vectors and tuples.
You can find a description of how to create dif files at the following.
http://www.wotsit.org/search.asp?s=database
They are just about as easy as CSV to create.
I usually give a choice of file format (text,CSV,excel) and output the
content-type and format of the file accordingly.
Rodos
P.S. Its really is a pain to get this to work (auto load into
excel) across lots of version of windows and eXcel. Avoid where possible.
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