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A comment on Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands. Parent comment

Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by emidln on Thursday November 30, 2017 @09:55PM (#15821561)
Excel has a feature for pulling data stored in HTML tables into a sheet called "Web Queries"[0]. It also has a feature for automatically building these in the form of .iqy files. When I worked at Abbott Labs, it was a big deal to be able to offer export-to-Excel in a way that Excel could refresh automatically (or manually). This made it a breeze since we could register an .iqy serializer for a dataset and just give a download link to it in place of a CSV, JSON, or XML file.

[0] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Get-external-data-f...

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by btilly on Friday December 01, 2017 @03:15PM (#15826954)
That was exactly how I did it. The only major downside was that I had to be sure to keep the html consistent, and couldn't require login.

Since it was a system for internal use, that was deemed acceptable.

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