Best way to turn an Excel sheet with macros into a website

[lt_murgen]

I was recently running a D6 / AD&D Birthright mashup campaign. I created an excel file based on the D6 Magic system that allows me t rapidly create and cost spells.

It was highly useful, and I found I could easily convert D6 to D&D spells, and vice-versa.

I think it would be really useful for many people who create D&D spells, but I don't know how to host it so it can be generally available.

Techies- any ideas where to start?

[Grinner]

I don't presently have access to a computer with Excel. With that having been said, I was able to open an arbitrary .XLS in OpenOffice Calc and save it to .HTML with File->Save as. Looking at the resulting HTML, it would be fairly simple to add links to it and integrate it into an existing website. Or you could register a Neocities website, rename the file "index.html", and upload it there.

Does that about cover your question?

Edit: Something occurred to me...Did you want to preserve the macros, not just whatever data you might have? If so, that would complicate things quite a bit. You'd have to learn some basic web programming, but your best option would be to write a simple calculator in HTML/Javascript.

[snowblizz]

Newer Office version I think allows you to web-publish a spreadsheet pretty much straight up (like Google spreadsheets are instantly avaialble online if you want). The problem will lie in the macros and what use you make of those since they present a potential security risk and will be blocked almost per default.

While it should be easy to convert xls into html document it likely won't have the same useage as a macroed xls would have. I strongly suspect that's going to require some degree of web-scripting.

[lt_murgen]

Edit: Something occurred to me...Did you want to preserve the macros, not just whatever data you might have? If so, that would complicate things quite a bit. You'd have to learn some basic web programming, but your best option would be to write a simple calculator in HTML/Javascript.

Most of it is simply linked Excel pulldowns and lookups from another tab full of charts. But there are two macros I would need to preserve. One takes the spell you created an adds it to another table of all the spells the system has created. That way, I don't lose the data. The second one allows you to select a spell and then it auto-formats it into a printable version.

You are right, I might need to learn some coding.

[Grinner]

Most of it is simply linked Excel pulldowns and lookups from another tab full of charts. But there are two macros I would need to preserve. One takes the spell you created an adds it to another table of all the spells the system has created. That way, I don't lose the data. The second one allows you to select a spell and then it auto-formats it into a printable version.

You are right, I might need to learn some coding.

Okay. The second macro may not be easy to replicate, depending on how pretty the output needs to be, but it's definitely doable. I've seen Javascript do things like that before.

The first macro could be more difficult due to the underlying storage requirements. You'd either need to store the generated spells on the user's computer using HTML5's local storage or use some kind of server-side scripting, like PHP. I'm not quite sure what you have envisioned for this, but this particular functionality would extend beyond what I'd call "basic web programming".

[KillianHawkeye]

I'm not quite sure what you have envisioned for this, but this particular functionality would extend beyond what I'd call "basic web programming".

I'm going to have to agree with this. A spreadsheet doesn't exactly translate into a web page very well. They're basically useless for web applications.

You could make a web page which does what you want using a database and a lot of scripting, but you'd basically have to recreate everything your spreadsheet is doing.

[Manga Shoggoth]

Is there any reason you can't just upload the spreadsheet and provide a link to it?

Admittedly that will limit the users to people with an appropriate copy of Office/Excel, but it will be easier than trying to reprogram the thing for the web.