Flash supports XML. Consultants and project managers support Excel. Have you ever wished that either Excel or any other spreadsheet application, or any other application for that matter, had a decent exporter for XML data? Not that proprietary-Microsoft-not-terribly-W3C-compliant-type, but real, simple, proper XML? Well I have, and instead of waiting for it I decided to create a small Flash application that certainly helps!
Not many desktop applications export XML at all, but make that CSV (Comma Separated …something) and quite a few do. A typical CSV export from an Excel spreadsheet could look like this:
Now wouldn’t you much rather have that data formatted a little more like this?
Nice and tidy – and best of all; Flash supports it natively!
No more talk. Head here: http://www.oyvindnordhagen.com/flashdev/csvtoxml/
how about:
name,address,keywords
John Doe, “myaddress, NY, US”, “non, ongo, nes”
Yeah, that would not work very well. But you could do a search/replace and swap all the commas in the spreadsheed to i.e. “>” and then swap them back again once the XML is created.
Excellent! Just what I was looking for.
[...] addition to creating the convertor, Øyvind Nordhagen has also written a blog post covering this subject. Thanks, Øyvind! This entry was posted in Miscellaneous, Tutorials by Mikkel. Bookmark the [...]