Pulling data from excel cells to webpage

[paddygman]

Hi all,
I'm looking to try and get a method in pretty much any language to pull a cell value from an excel doc to a webpage. The idea is that a team is in work and the working day is from 7am till 6pm. They have split this into 3 shifts
Morning floating and late (7-3/8~5/10/6) along with two other scenarios which arent relevant. I need to pull the cell value for a support person back as a variable to display on the webpage if possible. I realise i may need to put some excel forumals in and just pull the data then from that but i was wondering is there any easy way of doing this?
Thanks

[ryanbutler]

I've never messed with extracting data directly from an excel spread sheet because it's a pain to call the API and interface with it, since it's in binary form, I'd much rather interface with a flat text file, which brings me to this point.

Though, what you could do is create a tab-delimited text file from the excel spread sheet and then iterate through the text file and display certain cells of information based on a specific array element. Either way, you'll need a scripting language to pull it off.

[ray326]

There is a Java library for reading/writing Microsoft proprietary docs but the best thing would be to get the info out of Excel in the first place. I've used tab and csv files as an interface mechanism for Excel but they're only good for single sheets and a lot of times an app like this will have multiple tabs.

[paddygman]

cheers guys,
I'm attempting to look at an access database and some web forms for the guys to update with. Might be easier in the long run and then i can just pull the data from the database or just us a web report to display it. Any thoughts on that?

[Zoidal]

Access is much easy to use for this and I do it all the time. Unfortunately we're a ColdFusion house so I can't give you much help with ASP, PHP, etc., but SQL knowledge would be helpful to you.

Make sure you properly define your database and then you should be able to call up or combine any tables therein.

[ryanbutler]

I wouldn't waste my time on Access. Much beyond 500 hundred records, and you'll encounter performance issues. If you're using Windows hosting, then use SQL server and either ASP, ASP.NET or Coldfusion. If you're using Linux, then use MySQL and PHP.

[ray326]

I'll second the notion you use a real database server and not a file system database like Jet. (Access isn't a database at all, it's a query tool.) Since you sound very Microsofty, I'd say go with SQL Server.

[paddygman]

Hey guys,
I'll have to settle for whatever is on the server. Its not me thats micrsoftly but the group that has the server (i'll admit i'm no pro with linux/unix but i do dabble)
Its a Microsoft sharepoint app thats on the server and i'm trying to implement the rota on one of its pages. I've got an sub section of a page with an i-frame pointing to a page which i've uploaded to the shared documents section. I've never really done anything with access or sql bar some background CMS management on mysql. I'm not even sure if my plan to stick the db in the shared documents section would work and poing my iframe at the relevant access created report page.
Anyone informed on microsoft share point or anyone have any idea what i think i'm trying to achieve?
Thanks.