"Open in Excel": Another AIR 2 Mini Sample

November 24, 2009 By 32 Comments

In Adobe AIR 1.0 and 1.5, there were different options to “open” the data of a Flex DataGrid in Excel. For example, you could leverage the AIR native drag-and-drop support to drag rows from the DataGrid to an open Excel spreadsheet. You could also drag rows to the desktop (or anywhere on the file system) as an .xls file. These two approaches are demonstrated in my Salesbuilder sample application. Another approach was to use a server roundtrip to download the generated .xls file from the server and force Excel to open with the data.

There was however no immediate way to implement a straight (client-side only) “Open in Excel” feature (aka click a button to open your DataGrid data in Excel). With AIR 2.0 and the new File.openWithDefaultApplication() method this becomes extremely easy to implement. In the sample below, I provide an example of this new feature. The sample also supports the drag-and-drop approach from the AIR application to Excel and from the AIR application to the desktop (or anywhere else on the file system). This sample uses the as3xls library to create the Excel spreadsheet. View Source is enabled.

Installation Instructions

  1. Download the AIR 2.0 beta runtime here.
  2. Download AIR2Excel.air here.
  3. Double-click AIR2Excel.air in Explorer or Finder to start the installation process.

Filed Under: Air, Flex

Comments

  1. Nathan says:
    November 24, 2009 at 10:59 pm

    WOW.. This is what I’m waiting for the long…

    Thanks Christophe… AIR Rocks.. ;)

    Reply
  2. halı yıkama makinası says:
    December 5, 2009 at 8:21 pm

    Wow. Thanks for article.

    Reply
  3. vivian says:
    December 9, 2009 at 12:37 pm

    Hi Christ,
    When I run your salesbuilder-v2, I got several errors related to ilog.utils
    such as:
    Definition ilog.utils:GregorianCalendar could not be found.
    Definition ilog.utils:TimeUnit could not be found

    Could you let me know where I can find the ilog.utils package?
    Thank you!

    Reply
  4. vivian says:
    December 9, 2009 at 1:36 pm

    oh,…actually, I worked it out. :)

    Reply
  5. Oleg says:
    December 20, 2009 at 7:14 pm

    That is a nice sample. Is there any way to Read Excel file ?

    Also, since Excel 2007 there is a new nice file format – XLSX, which is compressed XML file.
    Any integration with that ? In fact, how can one read/write compressed files in AIR.

    In addition, there is a Java API called Apache POI, which works with XLS and XLSX.
    Any integration with that ?

    TIA,
    Oleg.

    Reply
  6. Claire says:
    February 12, 2010 at 4:31 pm

    Just what I was looking for – many thanks

    Reply
  7. Scott says:
    February 19, 2010 at 2:43 pm

    Trying to install the AIR2Excel.air file and getting the following error:

    This application requires an update to Adobe AIR that is not available for your system.
    Please view the system requirements for Adobe AIR and update your system accordingly.

    I am running the latest Air 2 beta 2. Any idea?

    Thanks.

    Reply
  8. Jeff Boothe says:
    March 2, 2010 at 9:36 am

    Christophe,

    It was great meeting you in Tampa last month.

    Just wanted to see if you could update your example to work with AIR 2 beta 2.

    Thanks,

    Jeff Boothe

    Reply
  9. Chinmay says:
    March 10, 2010 at 4:28 am

    Hi,

    Is there any way i can read an Excel file in AIR?

    Thanks,
    Chinmay

    Reply
  10. carpetwashingmachine says:
    March 11, 2010 at 2:16 am

    thats what i want.
    thanks alott

    Reply
  11. Daniel says:
    June 11, 2010 at 10:15 pm

    Hi,
    Thanks for sharing.
    I have done some research about export data to excel file for a while.Right now, it seems that the project as3xls could not support export data to excel file with formula and format.I would apprecaite if you could give some suggestion about how to implement that functionality with formula and format.

    Thanks,
    Regards!
    liu,meng-meng

    Reply
  12. olympus battery says:
    June 21, 2010 at 8:05 pm

    thats what i want.
    thanks alott

    Reply
  13. srinath says:
    July 2, 2010 at 7:41 am

    Hi,
    Thanks for sharing,
    How to read the header data.

    Thanks,
    Srinath

    Reply
  14. srinath says:
    July 2, 2010 at 7:43 am

    How to export grouped datagrid to Excel

    Thanks
    Srinath

    Reply
  15. Tom says:
    July 21, 2010 at 2:48 pm

    Where can I find the source code for this application?

    Reply
  16. cypress says:
    July 28, 2010 at 11:08 am

    Thanks. someone saved my life :D

    Reply
  17. medyum says:
    August 5, 2010 at 8:01 am

    thank you very nice excel very good

    Reply
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  21. Medion Akku says:
    June 6, 2011 at 8:03 pm

    WOW.. This is what I’m waiting for the long…

    Reply
  22. rehan says:
    June 20, 2011 at 5:13 am

    Nice work

    Could u let me know how can i import 2007 excel file

    Reply
  23. Clay says:
    August 1, 2011 at 12:09 pm

    Is it possible to export an image to excel through as3xls?

    Reply
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  26. nona says:
    October 13, 2011 at 11:20 am

    Thnx Nice work
    Where can I find the source code for this application?

    Reply
  27. Moncler store says:
    November 29, 2011 at 3:18 am

    thats what i want.
    thanks alott

    Reply
  28. Paul says:
    December 22, 2011 at 9:54 am

    This is great. Is there a way to also include the column titles, as a CSV file would do?

    Reply

Trackbacks

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  2. andy.edmonds.be › links for 2009-12-04 says:
    December 4, 2009 at 7:36 pm

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