Best way to present data from a big excel file on a website

Question

I have a big excel file and I want to show the data on my website. I have made a matlab and a Java program(script) that can extract the information I want from the excel file. How do I get the data to the website?

Should I have the matlab or java script running on a server and then make a javascript that in some way connects to the server? How would i do this?

Or should a make a javascript that directly reads the excel file?

I am a beginner in web development so I dont really know where to start...

Answer 1

I happened to do something like this while I had to analyze the grades I gave. What I did was export the Excel sheet as a CSV, and then put that in a website where I used JavaScript to first convert it to a JSON. This is the function I used to perform the conversion:

function csvJSON(csv){
    var lines=csv.split("\n");

    var result = [];

    var headers=lines[0].split(",");

    for(var i=1;i<lines.length;i++){

        var obj = {};
        var currentline=lines[i].split(",");

        for(var j=0;j<headers.length;j++){
            obj[headers[j]] = currentline[j];
        }
        result.push(obj);
    }

    //return result; //JavaScript object
    return JSON.stringify(result); //JSON
}

And then it was simple. to use. Let's say I put in a textarea the exported CSV, for instance:

Name,Grade1,Grade2
Bobby,87,12
Rakesh,9,3
//...

Then I called csvJSON() with this data to get:

[{"Name":"Bobby","Grade1":87,"Grade2":12},{"Name":"Rakesh","Grade1":9,"Grade2":3},/*...*/]

Which is especially easy to use. For instance:

var csv = ""; // get it from somewhere
var json = JSON.parse(csvJSON(csv));
for (int i = 0; i < json.length; i++)
{
    var obj = json[i];
    var name = obj.Name, Grade1 = obj.Grade1, Grade2 = obj.Grade2;
    //Do something
}