Balisage Paper: Excel to Excel using XML, really?
Geert Bormans
C-Moria BV
Geert Bormans has long been an angle-bracket jack-of-all-trades. He loves the beauty of a well-architected solution or a pure and simplified process. Geert makes a living as an independent consultant, through his company C-Moria BV, providing XML or Linked Open Data solutions, mainly to the publishing industry. He does so with a broad geographical flexibility.
Geert likes an interesting challenge, easily found when having two teenage daughters. However, he prefers the challenges to involve alpine ground, six strings, or markup.
Copyright © 2022 Geeert Bormans
Abstract
Merging several Excel documents, from different sources with different forms, into a single XML document that has to satisfy externally specified reporting requirements is a somewhat daunting prospect. You might imagine that a tool like Python (and Pandas) would be the appropriate place to start. But we were able to develop a solution using the XML stack in less time than was forecast for the Python-based solution. We use a single XProc 3.0 pipeline to merge the Excel files and produce both the required XML format and Excel files for internal use. We believe our success depended largely on the fact that the project design enabled precise, filtered, early feedback which reduced the number of iterations required to create the critical deliverable. In addition to ingesting and providing final data in the user’s preferred format (Excel) we were able to provide intermediate files, change tracking, and process documents in Excel.