In my latest project I need generate Excel .xls file from Flex. Because in Flex or Flash there is no support for such generation, I’ve to do it manually and I want to share this knowledge with all of you in this new tutorial serie. Because content of Excel file can vary this will be serie of posts. And this information is for all developers not only for Flash or Flex coders, because this is general information about generating .xls Excel file, only some parts can contain some ActionScript code.

Different ways of generating .xls file

There is many ways for generating .xls file, I will not write about all ways, just about ways, which were suitable for my Flex project. As probably all of you know .xls is binary file, but it’s not always true. I will write about this later.

How to start with generating .xls Excel file

Maybe best thing at the start is make test .xls file and save it and look at source code. As I told .xls has binary data format, but you have possibilities to save file as Webpage or XML file, and that’s what we want. So we got 2 text formats available:

• HTML
• XML

So SUPER SECRET is simple:

Save your html or xml file as .xls file – Excel will do the rest.

In next part I will show you some simple generation of .xls Ecel file with some styling. Stay tuned and subcribe to my RSS Feed or Follow me at Twitter