Ary Djmal

Looking at the Google Analytics stats I realized that a lot of people are still reading my blog post about how to export to Excel in Rails.

IMO I prefer the csv method because it provides the same + more at no extra cost, but given people still wants xls files I wrote another rails plugin: to_xls.

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UPDATE: SuperSaaS (Thanks!) mentioned that Excel does not interpret UTF8 characters in CSV files. So if that is a concern to you, maybe you should stick with XLS.

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Using this plugin you don't need the builder views, so it makes it as easy as the to_csv plugin I wrote. In fact it works the same.

In config/initializers/mime_types.rb register the custom mime type.

Mime::Type.register "application/vnd.ms-excel", :xls  

In the controller where you want to export to excel, add the format.xls line.

class UserController < ApplicationController
  def index
    @users = User.all

    respond_to do |format|
      format.html
      format.xml { render :xml => @users }
      format.xls { send_data @users.to_xls }
    end
  end
end

That's it!

Install

./script/plugin install git://github.com/arydjmal/to_xls.git