Calculations in web tables

sl70 · Guru Joined: 18 Jun 2002 Posts: 451 Location: Saitama, JP

(Does this belong in Off the Wall?)

I have created an HTML table with all our household articles (with photos and valuations) to submit to our insurance company. After I finished, I realized I had left some things out and so after adding them I had to calculate the category totals, subtotals and grand totals all over again. I got to thinking that there must be a way to do the calculation automatically.

I could do this in gnumeric or even MySQL or (heaven forbid) Excel, but I don't want to be wed to any particular software. All I want to require is a web browser (and an editor to put together the files).

Anyone have any suggestions on how to do this? Is it possible to do something like this in XML? If so, I would appreciate any tips or hints.

Thanks very much.

JPMRaptor · Guru Joined: 04 Oct 2002 Posts: 410 Location: Maryland

HTML (or XML) doesn't do that. They're not spreadsheet file formats. If you really want to do this in HTML you'll have to do something with Javascript to do the calculations. With XML you can make use of XSL to convert the input into HTML and do the needed calculations during the conversion process.

Most of the modern spreadsheet programs will allow you to export things as HTML so this is probably not even needed.
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