Other - Using Excel with Javascript

I have looked at several posts on this subject, but none seem to help me with my needs.
1) I have the html output from an excel file(sheet) that has been stored into a large text field in a mysql database.
2) I would like to launch excel into an iframe window of the browser and 'give' it the contents of this field to work with rather than opening up a file.
3) Later I would like to extract the html format date from excel and store it back into the database field.

Martyn

Hi griffinmt, welcome to the forums,
AFAIK there is no way to use javascript to parse excel files.
The excel file is offered as a download because the browser settings need to be set to "open files of this type with this app". That is, the launching of excel is in the realm of the browser's control, not the web page.
If this is only for your use, you should be able to do this however.
If you have PHP, there is a PEAR package - Spreadsheet Excel Writer http://pear.php.net/package/Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer - that should solve your problem as this is server-side and independent of browser settings.

Actually, I have just discovered how I can do this. Since every client has MS Office 2003 (at least), I can use the Web Component loaded as an ActiveX Object. It is not 100% the same as native Excel, but more than close enough for my application.

The only real issue now is that the spreadsheet (which is stored in a server side DB in HTML or XML format) will have to make the network trip back and forth several times. These are from 30kb to 170kb chunks, so this part of the app won't be overly fast!!