Converting XML with XSLT
Problem: Converting XML to Excel I had to convert some XML to sort and display as we wished in excel. After reading a bunch of articles about XML-FO and other stuff about cacoon and other Java solutions I decided to go with just using a fairly simple XSLT stylesheet and convert the XML to HTML tables with the excel extension. This is even the recommended solution by microsoft (Which is probably because excel has a bloated and often changing format.) So converting this way leads to a well and easy and nice looking excel file and has the benifeit that anyone without excel can also view the file in a standard web browser. The microsoft tutorial on converting XML with XSTL is very good. If you have any problems or need more advanced XSTL this is also another very usefull set of XSTL examples. The basic idea is to make the stylesheet so that it can sort and create a easy to view html table. Then you can either let excel open the XML which can find the stylesheet and apply it for the user, or you can use a program to do the conversion for your user and output excel or html files. I needed to generate the files for my users so I went with Xalan from the apache foundation. Xalan is a XSL stylesheet processors in Java & C++ The example is simple to modify for whatever you need. I used the example file SimpleTransform, which can be found in the installation directory at