I hear ya cluckin' big chicken! the nervous rustling of code, tech, and life

This post revisits an old, Classic ASP application that dynamically generated an Excel spreadsheet with two worksheets; one held the data and the other a logarithmic line chart based on the data. This was accomplished by triggering a series of VBS scripts (from IIS) that automated the spreadsheet creation and prepared it for download. It required MS Office and Excel to be installed on the server and in its heyday it bedazzled the engineer who came to rely on it. And when it didn't work, it could lock up the web server and deliver great pain and agony to its developer. Fast forward a few years, (and thanks to .NET, OOXML and HTML5/CSS3), the options....