News and Useful Tips

Did you know you can share and display your Excel spreadsheets online? You can embed even very complex spreadsheets right into your website for your customers to see. Perhaps you have a stock list that you update every week in Excel. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to display this same spreadsheet on your website so you can point your customers to it, without having to email them the latest version every time you make a change.

Not so long ago publishing spreadsheet online would require converting the whole file to hard-coded HTML table, which was always a laborous task. God help you if you wanted to make chanes to the table afterwards.

With the new web 2.0 technologies like Google Docs all this has now changed. You can use an online Office suite to upload your Word or Excel files, edit them-much the same way as you would with your usual program- and publish these files online. You can even invite other members of your team to make changes to your documents. Or even give general public access to your spreadsheet and have it updated “wiki” style.  Think of the incredible possibilities we now have at our disposal.

But back to the subject. Say you want to publish your spreadsheet on your website so you can update it easily and on regular basis.

You can use either Google Docs or EditGrid.com for this. I will use EditGrid in this example.

1. Register on EditGrid website to create an account. It’s free for individuals and there is a very small fee for business accounts.
2. Go to your workspace and upload your Excel .xls spreadsheet.  At the moment EditGrid doesn’t support .xlsx format so if you use the latest Office just save you document into the older 97 version.
3. You can make any changes you need to you spreadsheet right from the EditGrid workspace.
4. Click on “Publish” and choose what format or access level you wish to use. You can choose from a variety of formats - editable spreadsheet, read only HTML, PDF, Excel, Open Office and more.   Once you publish your spreadsheet, the system will generate a permanent URL link for you.
5. If you’d like to embed this spreadsheet into your website, you can do so simply by using iFrame tag with the spreadsheet URL.   Here is an example of the correct iframe code:

<iframe src="/http://www.editgrid.com/user/username/spreadsheet_name.html" width="700" height="500"
frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" name="myInlineFrame">
TEXT FOR NON-COMPATIBLE BROWSERS HERE</iframe>