Excel WFS Output Format

The GeoServer Excel plugin adds the ability to output WFS responses in either Excel 97-2003 (.xls) or Excel 2007 (.xlsx) formats.

Installation

From the website download page, locate your release, and download: geoserver-2.24.2-excel-plugin.zip (nightly geoserver-2.24-SNAPSHOT-excel-plugin.zip)
Unzip the archive into the WEB-INF/lib directory of the GeoServer installation.
Restart GeoServer.

Usage

When making a WFS request, set the outputFormat to excel (for Excel 97-2003) or excel2007 (for Excel 2007).

Examples

Excel 97-2003 GET:: http://localhost:8080/geoserver/wfs?request=GetFeature&version=1.1.0&typeName=topp:states&outputFormat=excel
Excel 2007 GET:: http://localhost:8080/geoserver/wfs?request=GetFeature&version=1.1.0&typeName=topp:states&outputFormat=excel2007

Excel 97-2003 POST:

<wfs:GetFeature service="WFS" version="1.1.0"
  outputFormat="excel"
  xmlns:topp="http://www.openplans.org/topp"
  xmlns:wfs="http://www.opengis.net/wfs"
  xmlns:ogc="http://www.opengis.net/ogc"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.opengis.net/wfs
                      http://schemas.opengis.net/wfs/1.1.0/wfs.xsd">
  <wfs:Query typeName="topp:states" />
</wfs:GetFeature>

Limitations

Excel 97-2003 files are stored in a binary format and are thus space-efficient, but have inherent size limitations (65,526 rows per sheet; 256 columns per sheet).

Excel 2007 files are XML-based, and have much higher limits (1,048,576 rows per sheet; 16,384 columns per sheet). However, because they are text files Excel 2007 files are usually larger than Excel 97-2003 files.

If the number of rows in a sheet or characters in a cell exceeds the limits of the chosen Excel file format, warning text is inserted to indicate the truncation.