Re: [xml-dev] editing XML with Spreadsheets, most likely Excel

["Andrew Welch" <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>]

On 03/12/2007, noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> There's another approach that can be ok for very simple scenarios, and
> that's to put the tags directly in the spreadsheet and export as ascii or
> unicode, using a PERL script or the like for final cleanup.  This may seem
> goofy, but it's pretty easy to make a sheet that looks like:
>
> <yourtag>  |  =refToFormulaForYourvalueHere | </yourtag>
>
> where the | are meant to represent cell boundaries.  Copy those rows as
> many times as you need and export as text and you'll get a run of text
> that looks like
>
> <yourtag>123</yourtag>
> <yourtag>456</yourtag>
>
> You can trivially wrap it in a document start/end tag, put on an XML
> declaration if you like, use string concatenation functions to build up
> attributes, etc.  Definitely not for complex nestings or mappings to
> elaborate existing XML schemas, but it's using the spreadsheet language in
> a style that's pretty natural for a spreadsheet person.  Depending on what
> else is in the sheet and how you export, you may wind up with other stuff
> before or after in the file, but it should be trivial to add marker lines
> and use a PERL script or the like to clip out the part you need.  Also,
> once you've got that simple XML, it's really easy to transform it to
> something more elaborate using XSLT or other XML tools.
>
> As I say, not the right approach for the most robust of complex cases, but
> can be a really fine way to pull out simple information.

Or save it out to csv and then use my csv-to-xml transform :)

http://andrewjwelch.com/code/xslt/csv/csv-to-xml_v2.html

Funnily enough it's the most popular page on my site and blog by 2 to
1 over the sudoku stuff (400+ views for November).    I do get the odd
email off people asking how to actually use it, so I should properly
do a third version where it's wrapped in a function...


-- 
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com
Kernow: http://kernowforsaxon.sf.net/