JavaScript Excel data extractor idea

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JavaScript Excel data extractor idea

After a lengthy conversation with my good friend Eric, it occurred to me that one really useful demo would be an Excel data extractor. That is, a trephine application which allows the user to browse for an Excel file on their system, then extract the relevant data and convert it into something more useful.

By using Apache POI, such an app could show Excel data in an HTML table, or export to CSV, JSON or XML. It would also be possible to allow the user to pick and choose certain columns to export, or delete rows, etc. And it should be no problem to include the capability to post the data back to a web service - either directly as text, or after a round compression (zip or gzip).

I wanted to have a demo ready to announce today, but it's a bit more complex to produce than I had at first anticipated, so unfortunately it'll be a few more days before I get it out there.

Does this sound useful to you? Are there some obvious features that I omitted above? Please comment and let me know! As always, I look forward to your suggestions.