I am trying to find a way to make a web application communicate with Excel in the same way that a desktop application could talk to it using COM. The basic description of my problem is as follows:
- User selects a cell within an Excel worksheet.
- User switches focus to a web application running inside a browser and clicks a button.
- The clicking of the button inside the web application causes a string to drop into the open Excel spreadsheet at the cell that was previously selected.
I should reiterate at this point that I am not trying to make a webpage generate an Excel file. Rather, I am trying to have the web application directly pass a message to the open instance of Excel.
This would be straightforward if I were writing a desktop application. But in the browser context, security is going to keep the web application from communicating with Excel. I understand that it might be possible to use an ActiveX control in IE to do this sort of thing, but I would prefer allow the application to run in any browser and ensure that the user does not have to modify their browser security settings.
Can anyone suggest a workaround? One thing I wondered about is whether you could use RTD to approach the problem. I have not used RTD, so I am unfamiliar with its exact capabilities. But if the user is logged into the web application, could their button click send a message to the server that is then relied back to the Excel instance using RTD? This assumes that the user also has an Excel plugin that provides their account credentials to the RTD server.
Thanks very much.