Save HTML table as an Excel spreadsheet Hey all... I wanted to share a useful tool that I wrote for making spreadsheets out of any HTML table. The reason that I wrote the tool is because there are many tables out there that contain data, but most are not sortable. Currently, there are some restrictions, but since it is still useful I wanted to get the tool up there in it's raw form. I have some instructions on the page as to how to use and configure IE security for the ActiveX script call, etc. One of the issues is that this only runs on Internet Explorer. Another prerequisite is that you need to have Microsoft Excel installed on your machine. This works fine for all of the tables that I tested this on. I strip out a most of the html tags that would slow down performance and otherwise cause problems. I haven't tested this out with any tables that use colspan or rowspan attributes - and I expect that these may cause some problems.
It was not working in Firefox because there is an issue with the ActiveX object (isnt the idea for ActiveX objects to be able to plug into any windows PE applications?). With Firefox for some reason, ActiveX is completely locked down when it comes to file manipulations. Perhaps somebody knows if there is an option that allows ActiveX access to work for Firefox. At the time, I didn't have time to search for a solution. If somebody wants to attempt to make it universal, you can just view the "tabletoexcel" source code; all of the relevant code is javascript.