Export HTML table to Excel - using jQuery or Java

Question

I've a HTML table on my JSP page, that I want to be exported to Excel on a button click.

What would be the best way of going about this?

(For ex., how would I do this using may be a jQuery function?)

Any code examples for demo purposes should be great.

Answer 1

I would recommend Apache POI, we've been using it for years, never had any problems.

Alot of examples online to get a good start, and the documentation on the site is also good: http://poi.apache.org/spreadsheet/quick-guide.html

Answer 2

Exporting to Excel file format with JQuery is impossible.

You can try with Java. There are a lot of libraries to do that.

Answer 3

I have been using the jQuery plugin table2excel. It works very well and no serverside coding is needed.

Using it is easy. Simply include jQuery

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.0.0/jquery.min.js"></script>

Now include the table2excel script (Remember to change the src destination to match yours)

<script src="dist/jquery.table2excel.min.js"></script>

Now simply call the script on the table you want exportet.

$("#yourHtmTable").table2excel({
    exclude: ".excludeThisClass",
    name: "Worksheet Name",
    filename: "SomeFile" //do not include extension
});

It's also easy to attach to a button like so:

$("button").click(function(){
    $("#table2excel").table2excel({
    // exclude CSS class
    exclude: ".noExl",
    name: "Excel Document Name"
    }); 
});

All examples are taken directly from the authors github page and from jqueryscript.net

Answer 4

I can suggest you to try http://code.google.com/p/gwt-table-to-excel/, at least the server part.

Answer 5

Excel can load CSV (comma-separated value) files, which are basically just files with everything that would go into separate Excel cells separated by comma.

I don't know enough about how jQuery can handle pushing information into a file that you would download, but it seems a jQuery library has been written that at least transforms html tables to CSV format, and it is here: http://www.kunalbabre.com/projects/table2CSV.php

Edit (February 29, 2016): You can use the table2csv implementation above in conjunction with FileSaver.js (which is a wrapper for the HTML5 W3C saveAs() spec).

The usage will end up looking something like:

var resultFromTable2CSV = $('#table-id').table2CSV({delivery:'value'});

var blob = new Blob([resultFromTable2CSV], {type: "text/csv;charset=utf-8"});

saveAs(blob, 'desiredFileName.csv');

Answer 6

I also spend lot of time to convert html to excel after lot of R & D i found following easiest way.

1. create hidden field and in that pass your html data to your servlet or controller for e.g

   <form id="formexcel" action="" method="post" name="formexcel">
       <input type="hidden" name="exceldata" id="exceldata" value="" />
   </form>
   

2. on your button of href click call following function and pass your html data using in document.formexcel.exceldata.value and your servlet or controller in document.formstyle.action

   function exportDivToExcel() {
       document.formexcel.exceldata.value=$('#htmlbody').html();
       $("#lblReportForPrint").html("Procurement operation review report");
       document.formstyle.method='POST';
       document.formstyle.action='${pageContext.servletContext.contextPath}/generateexcel';
       document.formstyle.submit();
   }
   

3. Now in your controller or servlet write following code

   StringBuilder exceldata = new StringBuilder();
   exceldata.append(request.getParameter("exceldata"));
   ServletOutputStream outputStream = response.getOutputStream();
   response.setContentType("application/vnd.ms-excel");
   response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
   response.setHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment;filename=\"exportexcel.xls\"");
   outputStream.write(exceldata.toString().getBytes());