Can Excel interpret a cell as HTML?

html excel aspose aspose-cells
Greg Smalter picture Greg Smalter · Dec 3, 2009 · Viewed 56.9k times · Source

I'm using Aspose.Cells to build an Excel document programmatically. This works great. One of the cells, though, is a block of raw HTML. I'm wondering if it is possible to tell Excel (in any fashion, including the GUI - you don't need to know the Aspose API) to parse and display a cell as HTML. Right now, it just shows up as the raw HTML in text format, tags and all.

I know Excel is capable of having HTML pasted into it, but it looks like it just parses it on its own and then Excel-ifies it for you, and it doesn't store the HTML, so it's not actually parsing it and displaying it as HTML. Plus, I can't figure out how to replicate this paste functionality anyway.

Thanks.

Answer

ScottF picture ScottF · Dec 4, 2009

Unfortunately the answer is no.

Excel has two HTML options:

  • Open a HTML file, which will sort of render the HTML, sort of, but won't contain any actual HTML in cells
  • Store HTML in cells, but as unformatted text.

You could, maybe possibly, come up with a macro that lets you enter HTML into a cell, then saves that HTML as a document, opens it up in another instance of Excel, then grabs that formatted HTML and places it in the original document; that way you would have two columns, one with the HTML, and one with the output. It would be very unsightly though. Don't do it :0)

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