From: Mark Thomas <mark@...>
Date: 2009-10-07T09:30:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and Excel and colour question

On Oct 5, 8:07 am, Axel Etzold <AEtz...@gmx.de> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I need to be able to write a file in Excel format, where the
> fields have different background colours based on
> some condition which is evaluated based on the entries
> at runtime.
> I tried to look at the spreadsheet gem, but couldn't figure out how to do it. I'd much prefer if you could point me to a solution that
> is platform-independent (Excel files can be opened
> from OpenOffice etc.) and/or would work together with JRuby.

The most popular platform-independent Excel creation library is POI
(http://poi.apache.org). It's a java library so you should be able to
use it from JRuby. You should be able to put in the formulas that
change the background color based on runtime content.

- Mark.