Section 4.9. Reformat XML Results for Excel | Excel 2003 Programming: A Developers Notebook (Developers Notebook)

4.9. Reformat XML Results for Excel

One thing you may notice when you return web service results directly to Excel through an XML Map is that mixed content is not automatically formatted. HTML/XML formatting tags such as < b > and < i > appear as "< b >" and "< i >" rather than as bold and italic (Figure 4-14).

Figure 4-14. Excel does not automatically interpret HTML formatting

4.9.1. How to do it

There's no simple way to prevent this problem, but you can fix it using the automatic text formatting features of Excel. Excel automatically reformats HTML text pasted from the Clipboard, so all you have to do is place the data in the Clipboard as HTML, then paste that data back into cells on the spreadsheet.

In Excel, you access the Clipboard using the DataObject object, so the following code puts the data from each cell of a worksheet into the Clipboard as HTML, then pastes that data back, causing Excel to correctly interpret HTML formatting:

    Sub TestReformat(  )        ' Call Helper function to interpret HTML formatting codes.        ReformatHTML ActiveSheet.UsedRange    End Sub     Sub ReformatHTML(rng As Range)        Dim clip As New DataObject, cell As Range        For Each cell In rng            clip.SetText "<html>" & cell.Value & "<html>"            clip.PutInClipboard            cell.PasteSpecial        Next    End Sub

4.9.2. How it works

After you run TestReformat on a worksheet, Excel interprets the HTML formatting codes as if you cut/pasted them from a web page (Figure 4-15).

Figure 4-15. HTML formatting after running ReformatHTML