While online spreadsheets like Google Docs make it very easy for anyone to embed tabular data in websites, let’s explore some new alternatives that you may find more useful depending on the requirement.
Publish Excel Data on the Web
If you have created a table inside Microsoft Excel (or Word) and like to embed that table into your blog, simply select and copy all the cells from Excel into the Clipboard. Paste that cell data into Tableizer and this service will give your HTML representation of that Excel Table.
Tableizer lets you select font styles for the cells and you may choose to have a different color for the header row. If you are using Windows Live Writer for writing blogs, you can directly copy-paste cells from Excel into Live Writer bypassing the need for Tableizer.
Related: Capture Web Tables into Excel
Embed Interactive Tables with Sort
If you posting a comparison chart on your blog, it makes sense to use Tablefy – this interesting service lets you create tables online and you may also include web images and online videos in the media cells.
Your site visitors can sort data in any column and best of all, they can swap rows and columns in the table without leaving your site (see example).
The only downside with Tablefy is that it won’t let you import CSV data into the tables and you’ll have to type everything online.
Embed Spreadsheets With Search Filters, Sort & More
If you looking to embed a large spreadsheet in your website, your best best is a blist widget – even Obama uses them on change.gov to display the donors list.
Unlike any other online spreadsheet, Blist offers a search box inside the embedded table itself so your visitors can easily find relevant cells even inside a relatively large dataset. Your blist tables can have images, star ratings and even visual indicators similar to the in-cell bars of Office 2007. For more, check the previous review of Blist spreadsheets.
Letting Users Edit your Tables Online
In situations where you want people to edit and download your tabular data, go with Zoho Sheet – these embeds have a “Save as Excel” link that will download the embedded portion of the sheet as an XLS file on the visitor’s computer.
Another advantage of using Zoho Sheet is that the sheets are interactive and editable. That means you can select cells and copy that data onto the clipboard just like a desktop app. Best of all, people can edit data inside the sheet (right click to insert new cells) and then save the changes locally – see this example of an embedded excel sheet.
Related Guide: How to Embed Anything in a Website
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/software/embed-tables-spreadsheet-data-in-websites/7435/
Tags: best, embed, feature, microsoft excel, spreadsheets, Software
Reader Comments
Oh. That’s great. I was trying to embed tables from Office in my wordpress based blog, now I can do this.
Written by Sanjeev Mishra on 02.19.09
Will Google bot read the data that is added to the webpage as a part of the publisher site?
Written by sandy on 02.21.09