Creating Excel files from Zope, and preserving formulas

Some days ago, Jon Udell, a well-known tech guru, posted an article about Excel spreadsheets that might be generated dynamically with Zope. His point was that the next generation of MS Office products, with XML capabilities, will be a great advance as it will be possible to generate spreadsheets or other documents, generating XML output out of web applications.

Well, my coleague engineers at CodeSyntax (mainly Gari and Jatsu) opened their eyes... Of course Udell is right, but spreadsheet generation can be achieved (in the case of Excel) even without XML, since Excel deals with HTML tables to directly convert them as spreadsheets. You don't need to wait for that new Office version. We already do it a long time ago with Zope, learned from here, and use this in several projects,

You just need to export from Excel to HTML, and then upload it to Zope as ZPT or DTML and insert the required ZPT or DTML sentences.

So, Gari pointed this to Jon Udell, and, well, the guru was intrigued, particularly if this method did preserve formulas in the Excel files generated... The answer is yes. Here, a little demo to demonstrate it.

I post this at my blog 'cause these friends of mine don't blog in English. Gari and Jatsu were also excited that a tech-guru exchanges info with them, just around the same time that he interviews Bill Gates.