How to add formatting when exporting to excel in rails

Question

This is when using a view file to generate an excel file. like: in controller:

headers['Content-Type'] = "application/vnd.ms-excel"
headers['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename="report.xls"'

then in view:

<table><tr><td>foo</td><td>bar</td></tr><table>

Is it possible to add formatting such as color to cells? like:

<td style="background-color=red">foo</td>

Answer 1

Interesting -- I didn't know you could make Excel spreadsheets through HTML tables. (I just tried it myself and was amazed.) I don't think CSS will work very reliably -- you're probably stuck with HTML as it existed around HTML 3.2 (circa 1996). Although I cringe a little writing it, this worked for me:

<td bgcolor="red">foo</td>

or

<td bgcolor="#f00">foo</td>

I tested this in OpenOffice.org 3.2.

That being said, it might be worth learning the MS Office XML format if you need a lot of control over formatting. If I remember correctly, you can apply the formatting yourself in Excel, then unzip the .xlsx file, and see what it wrote out.