How to create an Excel File with Nodejs?

I am a nodejs programmer . Now I have a table of data that I want to save in Excel File format . How do I go about doing this ?

I found a few Node libraries . But most of them are Excel Parsers rather than Excel Writers .I am using a Linux Server . Hence need something that can run on Linux . Please let me know if there are any helpful libraries that you know of .

Or is there a way I can convert a CSV file to an xls file ( programmatically ) ?

I just figured a simple way out . This works -

Just create a file with Tabs as delimiters ( similar to CSV but replace comma with Tab ). Save it with extension .XLS . The file can be opened in Excel .

Some code to help --

var fs = require('fs');
var writeStream = fs.createWriteStream("file.xls");

var header="Sl No"+"\t"+" Age"+"\t"+"Name"+"\n";
var row1 = "0"+"\t"+" 21"+"\t"+"Rob"+"\n";
var row2 = "1"+"\t"+" 22"+"\t"+"bob"+"\n";

writeStream.write(header);
writeStream.write(row1);
writeStream.write(row2);

writeStream.close();

This creates the file in XLS file format . It doesnt work if you try XLSX instead of XLS .

I am using the library msexcel-builder. you can install it by running the next command:

npm install msexcel-builder

To get code example, please go to the next link

XLSx in the new Office is just a zipped collection of XML and other files. So you could generate that and zip it accordingly.

Bonus: you can create a very nice template with styles and so on:

  1. Create a template in 'your favorite spreadsheet program'
  2. Save it as ODS or XLSx
  3. Unzip the contents
  4. Use it as base and fill content.xml (or xl/worksheets/sheet1.xml) with your data
  5. Zip it all before serving

However I found ODS (openoffice) much more approachable (excel can still open it), here is what I found in content.xml

<table:table-row table:style-name="ro1">
    <table:table-cell office:value-type="string" table:style-name="ce1">
        <text:p>here be a1</text:p>
    </table:table-cell>
    <table:table-cell office:value-type="string" table:style-name="ce1">
        <text:p>here is b1</text:p>
    </table:table-cell>
    <table:table-cell table:number-columns-repeated="16382"/>
</table:table-row>