hey, i'm wondering if someone here has an answer to my problem i'm looking to create a web app where the user uploads an excel spreadsheet in a specific format than I run an mssql query based on it's contents along with the contents of various other tables in my database. as far as i can see the easiest thing would be to create a temporary table in the database to hold the data from the uploaded spreadsheet. than run an average query incorporating this new table. unfortunately, i have no idea how i could go about creating the temporary table, are there sql commands i can use to extract data from an excel spreadsheet? i haven't even started to create this web app so i don't have any code to show you.. i just wanted to see if this is a feasible idea
Are you using PHP? I have never done this with PHP, but it is possible. You may need to buy a third party object to do the parsing. There are some issues to watch out for. CSVs are usually easier to work with than Excel files. Excel (whether you save as a CSV or not) has a tendancy to screw up certain types of data. Strings are fine, but long numbers tend to get converted to scientific notation if you're not careful. It takes some tweaking, but definately do able. Do this same thing in several .Net web apps.
i'm actually using coldFusion which is both bogus and sad.. but it's what i'm stuck with. it may have something built in for parsing a spreadsheet but i'm not sure. the problem with switching to .CSV's is that the data is coming in as excel spreadsheets, .xls i think, and it would require more steps in the process to change that over to a .CSV