I am currently exporting to Excel using the old HTML trick, where I set the MIME type to application/ms-excel. This gives the added benefit of nicely formatted tables, however the negative of the excel document not being native Excel format.
I could export it as CSV, but then this would not be formatted.
I have read brief snippets that you can export it as XML to create the Excel document, but cannot find too much information on this. Does anybody know of any tutorials and/or benefits of this? Can it be formatted tables using this method?
Thanks.
Easiest way, you could parse your table and export it in Excel XML format, see this for example: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brian_jones/archive/2005/06/27/433152.aspx
It allows you to format the table as you whish (borders, fonts,colors, I think even formulas), and Excel will recognize it as native excel format. As a plus, you can use other programs that can import Excel XML (ie.Open office, Excel viewer,etc) and you do not need to have Office components installed on the server.