Question

I'm working on an online application which will calculate reports for users based on various parameters they select. I'd like to automatically show this report as a spreadsheet, complete with an embedded graph and the usual whistles (the ability to add formulas, move the graph around, change it, export to CSV, export to PDF, etc...).

In short, I need an online spreadsheet (service or program I can install on the server) that I can control to display the report in a seamless format, in the context of my page.

I checked the similar questions presented by SO, but they were all asking for subtly different things. I also googled, but quite a few of the offerings I saw were either limited in some way (often, no graphs) or it was unclear if I could control the spreadsheet in this way. I'm still digging through some other leads, including Zoho and OpenOffice's Calc...

Still, with all the stuff out there, I can spend a lot of time on dead ends, so I'm hoping you can help me cut down the search space, or point me to some products that fit the above.

Commercial or free products are fine, but the license must allow commercial use.

Update: I've spent some time with Google Drive, Zoho and Caspio, but they look like overkill, as they seem to work on the premise that the data will be stored in their server, with collaboration facilities. All I need is a rich spreadsheet service that I can invoke on data I pass to it. Products I install on our server are ok, and on that front I looked at Sheetster, but I could find no useful documentation and it seems to require JSP.

Was it helpful?

Solution

I figured oout a way to do it with Zoho. Assume my server is at myUrl and the sheet I'm generating is called mySheet.xls. I would then do the following:

First, call server side code to generate the spreadsheet. PHPExcel seems to do a good job of this.

Next, save the created spreadsheet to mySheet.xls.

Finally, return a page with the the following snippet of code:

<iframe
   src="https://sheet.zoho.com/view.do?url=myUrl/mySheet.xls"
   style="width:800px; height:600px;"
   frameborder="0">
</iframe>

Of course the usual terms of use for Zoho apply.

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