axlsx_styler

axlsx_styler is a gem that allows you to build clean and maintainable styles for your axlsx spreadsheets. Build your spreadsheeet with data and then apply styles later.

While axlsx is an excellent tool to build Excel spreadsheets in Ruby, the sheets styles are only applied immediately as the row is created. This makes it very difficult to style easily and effectively.

To solve this issue, axlsx_styler was born to allow the separation of styles from content within your axlsx code. It gives you the ability to fill out a spreadsheet with data and apply styles later.

Works well in any Rails app or outside of any specific Ruby framework.

Usage

This gem provides a DSL that allows you to apply styles or borders to ranges of cells.

Styles

sheet.add_style 'A1:D10', b: true, sz: 14

The styles can be overlayed, so that later on you can add another style to cells that already have styles.

sheet.add_style 'A1:D1', bg_color: 'FF0000'

Applying multiple styles as a sequence of Ruby hashes is also possible.

bold     = { b: true }
centered = { alignment: { horizontal: :center } }
sheet.add_style 'A2:D2', bold, centered

Applying a style to multiple ranges at once.

sheet.add_style ['A2:G2', "A8:G8", "A12:G12"], b: true, sz: 14

Borders

The border style is to draw a thin black border on all four edges of the selected cell range.

sheet.add_border 'B2:D5'

You can easily customize the border styles.

sheet.add_border 'B2:D5', [:bottom, :right]
sheet.add_border 'B2:D5', { edges: [:bottom, :right], style: :thick, color: 'FF0000' }

Applying border to multiple ranges at once.

sheet.add_border ['A2:G2', "A8:G8", "A12:G12"]

Example

Suppose we want create the following spreadsheet:

You can apply styles after all data is entered, similar to how you'd create an Excel document by hand.

require 'axlsx_styler'

axlsx = Axlsx::Package.new
workbook = axlsx.workbook
workbook.add_worksheet do |sheet|
  sheet.add_row
  sheet.add_row ['', 'Product', 'Category',  'Price']
  sheet.add_row ['', 'Butter', 'Dairy',      4.99]
  sheet.add_row ['', 'Bread', 'Baked Goods', 3.45]
  sheet.add_row ['', 'Broccoli', 'Produce',  2.99]
  sheet.column_widths 5, 20, 20, 20

  # using AxlsxStyler DSL
  sheet.add_style 'B2:D2', b: true
  sheet.add_style 'B2:B5', b: true
  sheet.add_style 'B2:D2', bg_color: '95AFBA'
  sheet.add_style 'B3:D5', bg_color: 'E2F89C'
  sheet.add_style 'D3:D5', alignment: { horizontal: :left }
  sheet.add_border 'B2:D5'
  sheet.add_border 'B3:D3', [:top]
end
axlsx.serialize 'grocery.xlsx'

If you try creating this same spreadsheet using only axlsx, you will find this is much more difficult. See this See this example

For more examples, please see the examples folder

Contributing

We use the appraisal gem for testing multiple versions of axlsx. Please use the following steps to test using appraisal.

1. bundle exec appraisal install
2. bundle exec appraisal rake test

Credits

Created by Anton Sakovich - @sakovias

Maintained by Weston Ganger - @westonganger - Uses axlsx_styler within the gem, spreadsheet_architect