Unable to view XML spreadsheet in excel 2000

[Anand]

Hi
I have a server side XML file that is formatted via a XSL and genrated as
a Excel file. I am able to view the formatted report in Office exce 2002 and
higher.

But when I downloade the report in my office 2000 excel all i am able to see
if only the xml lines of code that has the attributes etc of each row to be
displayed but it is not renderred in the formate as it is in 2002 or higher.

I understand that there is the XML support for 2002 and higher. Given that
we have user who have only excel 2000 are there any other work around (like
installing a service pack etc. or plug in ) to view the report other than
asking them to upgrade to excel 2002? Please let me know.

Our user communities have a strict IT implementation guideline on upgrading
to 2002 only in future and was looking at if there could be any other
alternatives. Please let me know. Also if someone could let me know when does
microsoft stop the support (like service pack, bug fixes etc.) for excel
2000 it would be of help.

Thanks
Anand

 

[Pete_UK]

I had the same problem earlier this year (and every month since then).
A supplier changed their billing platform and when I opened the .xls
file that they send me each month with XL2000 I found it was just made
up of lines of xml code.

I get round it by changing the .xls extension to .htm, and then when I
double-click the file it opens directly in Internet Explorer. However,
all of the formatting has been lost and the data and text appears as
one continuous stream of text, with a single space between each field
of data. From IE I can save the file as a text file, which I can then
put into Notepad.

Here I can do some manipulation on the data. There are no end of
record markers, but I can recognise the start of each row by the
account number, so I can insert manual line breaks where required
(there are only 66 rows in this file, but it has loads of columns).
As each record wraps round several rows, I have to delete a lot of
line breaks. Most of the data fields are numbers, but one field
contains the address with a single space between each address element,
so I can use Find & replace repeatedly to change those spaces to _.
There are two other text fields which contain the word Unit, so I can
change the spaces in these fields to underscores.

Ultimately I end up with a text file which is space-delimited, so I
can eventually bring it into Excel. There I have to do some further
manipulation (eg change underscores back to spaces) and insert cells
where things don't quite line up, but after about an hour I can work
on the file in the way I used to do before the change of billing
platform.

Very tedious, and not recommended, but it IS possible to get the data
into Excel 2000.

Hope this helps.

Pete