Can Excel interpret a cell as HTML?

Question

I'm using Aspose.Cells to build an Excel document programmatically. This works great. One of the cells, though, is a block of raw HTML. I'm wondering if it is possible to tell Excel (in any fashion, including the GUI - you don't need to know the Aspose API) to parse and display a cell as HTML. Right now, it just shows up as the raw HTML in text format, tags and all.

I know Excel is capable of having HTML pasted into it, but it looks like it just parses it on its own and then Excel-ifies it for you, and it doesn't store the HTML, so it's not actually parsing it and displaying it as HTML. Plus, I can't figure out how to replicate this paste functionality anyway.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Unfortunately the answer is no.

Excel has two HTML options:

• Open a HTML file, which will sort of render the HTML, sort of, but won't contain any actual HTML in cells
• Store HTML in cells, but as unformatted text.

You could, maybe possibly, come up with a macro that lets you enter HTML into a cell, then saves that HTML as a document, opens it up in another instance of Excel, then grabs that formatted HTML and places it in the original document; that way you would have two columns, one with the HTML, and one with the output. It would be very unsightly though. Don't do it :0)

Answer 2

Pasting html data in excel will result in the html being properly displayed in excel. The one issue with this is that carriage returns and tabs will be pasted to the next cell.

Dim objData As New DataObject
objData.SetText(sHTML)
Clipboard.SetDataObject(objData)
objRange.PasteSpecial()

Will fill a cell with properly formated text

Answer 3

This code worked for me on one cell (inspired by @Rick's answer, but with few changes because Clipboard.SetDataObject(objData) caused error and also objRange.PasteSpecial() didn't work):

Private Sub Worksheet_Change2(ByVal Target As Range, ByVal sht As Worksheet)
     Dim objData As DataObject 'Set a reference to MS Forms 2.0'
     Dim sHTML As String
     Dim sSelAdd As String
     Application.EnableEvents = False     
     objData = New DataObject
     sHTML = Target.Text
     objData.SetText sHTML
     objData.PutInClipboard
     sht.PasteSpecial Format:="Unicode Text"
     Application.EnableEvents = True
End Sub

Sub test()
     Dim rng As Range
     Set rng = ActiveSheet.Range("F15") 'cell to change'
     Worksheet_Change2 rng, ActiveSheet 
End Sub

see this post for some more details

I guess it shouldn't be too difficult to tweak it a bit that it would work for entire worksheet and not only one specific cell, you should probably add some if condition to wrap this code in order to prevent errors, see this post for some more info

Answer 4

I found an interesting YouTube video which shows how to create a simple HTML Interpreter (VBA) in Microsoft Excel using the web browser control. Enter your HTML and CSS code into a text box, and the form will convert the HTML into a web preview.

HTML Interpreter in Microsoft Excel 2010/2007 - Write directly to Web Browser