This content is part of the series: Tip Stay tuned for additional content in this series. Contrary to what you might think, not every document is initially written in XML. Actually, most documents are prepared with some other tool and later converted to XML. Many documents originate from relational databases such as DB2, or from Microsoft Office applications such as Word or Excel. I have found that many businesses use Excel to edit and prepare data.

It's simple to use, widely available, and its tabular format is well-suited to all kinds of information, like lists of products, lists of names, financial data, or statistical data. Excel spreadsheets are often e-mailed to users who are asked to fill in the blanks. Retrieve your data One of the issues that arises when collecting and preparing data in a proprietary application is recovering the data. Fortunately, this is not an issue with Excel. Although the specifications for the Excel file format are not publicly available, a number of options can extract XML information from a spreadsheet.

This tip reviews your options and highlights each solution's pros and cons. XMLSS The latest versions of Excel -- Excel 2002 and Excel XP -- can export a spreadsheet to XML. While you don't have any say over the choice of tags, you do get a valid XML document that you can post-process with any XML tool, including an XSLT stylesheet.

May 20, 2016. Since, CSV files can easily be opened using LibreOffice Calc in Ubuntu or Microsoft Excel in Windows, the need for XML to CSV conversion is high. Now let us take. The python program written above will open a CSV file in tmp folder and write content of XML file into it and close it at the end. Make sure to.

The format is known as XMLSS. This is the simplest solution if: • Your users have the latest version of Excel, and • You're processing XML data on a workstation. The first condition is obvious, the second one might need more explanation. Suppose you set up a server to collect and process statistical data.

Your users prepare the data with Excel and later upload their spreadsheets to the server for further processing. The first step is to convert the spreadsheet to XML. One solution is to open the spreadsheet in Excel and export it in the XMLSS format.

I have seen companies implement such a solution and, while it can run, it's important to keep in mind that Excel was designed for workstations, not servers. Although functional, this solution might not be as stable as you would like. Among other issues, the spreadsheet conversion may become a bottleneck because it may be difficult to multithread the conversion. In the worst case, every request is queued into a single copy of Excel. It also limits your hosting options: Excel is only available on Windows and MacOS.

Download Wedding Dash No Time Limits more. CSV files The first alternative is to work not with actual spreadsheet files but with comma-separated value (CSV) files instead. CSV is a popular file format for exchanging spreadsheets. Any worthy spreadsheet can export to and import from CSV files. Furthermore, many third-party products that work with spreadsheets also support CSV. For example, most accounting packages can work with CSV files.

Although CSV files are not XML, it is simple to convert them into XML files with tools such as XI (see ). The TopXML site also includes algorithms for a pure XSLT solution. Using CSV files is much more attractive for servers. For one thing, you are no longer limited to certain platforms. Instead, you are broadening the options for your users (who can now work with Lotus 1-2-3 and other spreadsheets as well as many third-party tools that also recognize the CSV format).

About the only downside with this solution is that your users must take the extra step of saving their data in CSV. In practice I have found that this is seldom a problem, but your mileage may vary. Plain conversion Last but not least, you can turn to special libraries to read Excel documents. The Excel file format is not officially documented, but third-parties have been reverse-engineering it for some time. They have also produced libraries to decode Excel files (see ). Here's a list of some of the available APIs: • Java Excel API is one of my favourite solutions because it is portable, does a fair job of reading XML documents, and includes a conversion to XML. • XML::Excel is a Perl API for converting Excel documents into XML.