Cleaning up microsoft produced html for hash including in a 'clean' webpage

Question

I have an intranet page that uses #include to include other files such as rotas or phone number tables. These included files are maintained in microsoft excel.

Not all of them are maintained by me (the guy in charge of the intranet itself) so there isn't really the option to refuse to accept excel produced html files.

The problem I have is that these files are crammed full of crap that is almost certainly not needed by the browser to display what is esentially a simple table with some colour formatting in places (and sometimes text will be bolded or italic in particular cells)

What, in your opinion would be a better way to go about this? Is there some code that can clean all the crap out of a file saved by excel as html? Is there a neater more industry-known way to display content inline generated by third parties?

Any suggestions welcome.

edit: Solutions that use ASP, PHP, Javascript also welcome.

Answer 1

Is there some repeating structure to your files? Exporting to CSV (comma-separated values) and rebuilding the tables from that source could be easier and faster than trying to remove dozens of unwanted elements and attributes Excel think it has to add.

If your bolded and italic particular cells are really particular (a whole column of data is part italic part normal), than CSV won't help though.