Using worksheet data in a Web site (MSO FP 2003 (11.6552.8132) SP2)

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Details of club fixtures and bookings are listed in a worksheet on a daily basis for a calendar year and frequently edited for changes and new bookings. This work is done in the club’s office. The current worksheet is emailed to me each month.

For the club’s web site I have created 12 pages, one for each month of a year and copy & paste the worksheet month by month into the web site. I then manually format the monthly lists before publishing. Updating is done at least monthly. As all this is something of a chore I want to simplify the process particularly as 31 rows of information can result in 600 lines of code! An example of one of these pages is at: http://www.sandiwaygolf.co.uk/fandbsample.htm%5B/url%5D

Can any one suggest a simple alternative perhaps using CSS?

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If I was doing this, I’d try to automate the process – either writing some code to run on the worksheet itself to produce the required html, or using PHP (if your server supports it) to read the data from the worksheet and output the html on the fly. The former is probably the better approach as it’s a once-and-done for each file and (depending what sort of worksheet we’re talking about – I’m presuming MS Excel?) all the tools are already available to you.

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Thank you very much for your reply. I think Jerry’s suggestion using DW is easier for me. But I am grateful for your response.

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Hi Malcolm

Now I am back at home and had a chance to play I tested it out with Dreamweaver MX 2004 and it works quite well clearing a considerable amount of the superfluous MS tagging. I added some CSS:

results table {
background-color: #FFFFFF;
border: thin solid #BF0D62;
}
.results td {
border-top: 1px solid #BF0D62;
border-right: 1px solid #BF0D62;
border-left: 1px solid #BF0D62;
}

and got a reasonable view, I’ll let you have a play now

http://magicforest.co.uk/malcolm/fandbsample.htm%5B/url%5D

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That’s very encouraging – thank you again.

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Hi Malcolm

I was in the process of replying earlier but a silly thing call work got in the way

I have exactly the same problem with my Running Club website in which the Race Director has a habit of sending time trial data through in Excel expecting me to put it up on the site. The issue is the process of cutting and pasting MS data into a HTML page it carries across the format and creates the styles and tagging to fit it and in doing so ( as you have found out) bloats the code.

I have got around this issue using Dreamweaver which has the (very useful) ability to delete MS Word HTML, I then created various styles for table, th, td and tr. As it as it stands the coding in your pages will not be assisted by CSS as the tagg soup would over write anythng in the CSS.

Whilst umming and arring about this issue with my website I had created an asp page with connectivity to an Excel workbook that displayed on the page and using CSS had a very nicely formatted page and with little work apart from naming a range in excel and dumping it in my root folder ready for the page to pick it up , however, in practice it did not work the web host did not allow read/write for this work for security. Before you go down the asp route just check it is possible with your account.

As you specific question mentions CSS, you can format it further using the following ( this is an an indicative answer to demonstrate). Between the head tag paste this code:

.results table {
background-color: #FFFFFF;
border: thin solid #BF0D62;
}
.results tr {
border-bottom: thin solid #BF0D62;
border-left: thin;
}

Locate the table tag that starts your results tabular data and type:

and add a

tag at the end of the table

This will now produce a maroon border to the table and in Firefox a maroon border to all the table rows. This obviously now makes your code even longer but at least you can format it now

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I’m glad you can come to terms with your priorities. As I am retired such trivial matters as work make no call on my time! {8;-))

It would seem a monumental task to strip out all the tags and then apply css and as I also use DW MX 2004 I will look at your way of handling the worksheets. ( I don’t think my Web host (my son-in-law!) would be impressed if I wanted to use ASP on his server! )

Also thank you for the css – it is very much appreciated.

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It’s possible that DreamWeaver is using a utility named “HTML Tidy” to do the tag clean-up. It has been integrated into some freeware/shareware editors as well. Or you can go to the “source” on SourceForge.net: http://tidy.sourceforge.net/%5B/url%5D.

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Thank you – I have the HTML Validator, that is from SourceForge, add-on already installed in Firefox. So I have a tool to clean the HTML.

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