Export HTML table to Excel - using jQuery or Java

Question

I've a HTML table on my JSP page, that I want to be exported to Excel on a button click.

What would be the best way of going about this?

(For ex., how would I do this using may be a jQuery function?)

Any code examples for demo purposes should be great.

Answer 1

I would recommend Apache POI, we've been using it for years, never had any problems.

Alot of examples online to get a good start, and the documentation on the site is also good: http://poi.apache.org/spreadsheet/quick-guide.html

Answer 2

Rather export to CSV format. It's supported by Excel as well. Exporting to a fullworthy XLS(X) format using for example Apache POI HSSF or JExcepAPI is slow and memory hogging.

Exporting to CSV is relatively simple. You can find a complete code example in this answer.

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As to exporting to files using JavaScript, this is not possible without interaction of Flash or the server side. In Flash there's as far only the Downloadify library which can export to simple txt files. Further, ExtJs seems to have a CSV export library, but I can't find any feasible demo page.

Answer 3

You can parse the table using a library like http://jsoup.org/

After you get the data, you can store it in Excel-compatible format (CSV), or using Java Excel library for that like POI, or using JDBC to write data into Excel sheet, see this example: Password Protected Excel File

Answer 4

I also spend lot of time to convert html to excel after lot of R & D i found following easiest way.

1. create hidden field and in that pass your html data to your servlet or controller for e.g

   <form id="formexcel" action="" method="post" name="formexcel">
       <input type="hidden" name="exceldata" id="exceldata" value="" />
   </form>
   

2. on your button of href click call following function and pass your html data using in document.formexcel.exceldata.value and your servlet or controller in document.formstyle.action

   function exportDivToExcel() {
       document.formexcel.exceldata.value=$('#htmlbody').html();
       $("#lblReportForPrint").html("Procurement operation review report");
       document.formstyle.method='POST';
       document.formstyle.action='${pageContext.servletContext.contextPath}/generateexcel';
       document.formstyle.submit();
   }
   

3. Now in your controller or servlet write following code

   StringBuilder exceldata = new StringBuilder();
   exceldata.append(request.getParameter("exceldata"));
   ServletOutputStream outputStream = response.getOutputStream();
   response.setContentType("application/vnd.ms-excel");
   response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
   response.setHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment;filename=\"exportexcel.xls\"");
   outputStream.write(exceldata.toString().getBytes());
   

Answer 5

Excel can load CSV (comma-separated value) files, which are basically just files with everything that would go into separate Excel cells separated by comma.

I don't know enough about how jQuery can handle pushing information into a file that you would download, but it seems a jQuery library has been written that at least transforms html tables to CSV format, and it is here: http://www.kunalbabre.com/projects/table2CSV.php

Edit (February 29, 2016): You can use the table2csv implementation above in conjunction with FileSaver.js (which is a wrapper for the HTML5 W3C saveAs() spec).

The usage will end up looking something like:

var resultFromTable2CSV = $('#table-id').table2CSV({delivery:'value'});

var blob = new Blob([resultFromTable2CSV], {type: "text/csv;charset=utf-8"});

saveAs(blob, 'desiredFileName.csv');

Answer 6

I have been using the jQuery plugin table2excel. It works very well and no serverside coding is needed.

Using it is easy. Simply include jQuery

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.0.0/jquery.min.js"></script>

Now include the table2excel script (Remember to change the src destination to match yours)

<script src="dist/jquery.table2excel.min.js"></script>

Now simply call the script on the table you want exportet.

$("#yourHtmTable").table2excel({
    exclude: ".excludeThisClass",
    name: "Worksheet Name",
    filename: "SomeFile" //do not include extension
});

It's also easy to attach to a button like so:

$("button").click(function(){
    $("#table2excel").table2excel({
    // exclude CSS class
    exclude: ".noExl",
    name: "Excel Document Name"
    }); 
});

All examples are taken directly from the authors github page and from jqueryscript.net

Answer 7

Exporting to Excel file format with JQuery is impossible.

You can try with Java. There are a lot of libraries to do that.

Answer 8

You would have to create something on the server-side (like a servlet) to read the html and create the excel file and serve it back to the user.

You could use this library to help you do the transformation.

Answer 9

I can suggest you to try http://code.google.com/p/gwt-table-to-excel/, at least the server part.