Workbook gem - how to write the excel to html in a formatted manner?

Question

I am using Workbook gem to preview the excel file without page breaks in my website. Right now, I am successful in extracting the excel file and writing it into html format and display as preview.

The following code extracts and writes the excel to html:

excel_file = Workbook::Book.open "#{file_url}"
excel_file.write_to_html(file_name + ".html")

But this gives me an unformatted html sheet with no rows and columns or any of the existing excel file.

According to murb/workbook documentation, it is said that we can pass the format as a hash within its options.

write_to_html(filename = "#{title}.html", options = {})

So, to achieve the format hash, I tried the following code:

excel_file.template.formats

But this returns a null hash. So, how can i get all the formats from the excel file and write to html? Or at least show the html table with borders for all rows and columns.

Answer 1

The author here. The Workbook gem is mainly built to extract and rerepresent the data in files, and not so much the formatting. In the past I made a few attempts on adding support to maintain formatting when converting, but it is far from complete. Some importers don't even set the formatting hash as you found out, notably the xlsx importer needs work on this.

The HTML was built to simply give a basic preview of the data. It basically returns a html-page with all tables which is by default unformatted, although format-names are used in the classes. There is an option though, if you'd pass style_with_inline_css: true... but then it requires an importer to actually set the format hash properly...

I'm happy to guide you here and there when you want to improve the xlsx importer code to suit your needs and hopefully the workbook gem in general, but it will need serious work if you want more than just some background colours and font properties.