Exporting to Excel from Rails without a gem

See this Railscast Show archive.org snapshot .

Basically you can simply write views like index.xlsx.erb:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Workbook xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:spreadsheet"
  xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"
  xmlns:x="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:excel"
  xmlns:ss="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:spreadsheet"
  xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">
  <Worksheet ss:Name="Sheet1">
    <Table>
      <Row>
        <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">ID</Data></Cell>
        <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">Name</Data></Cell>
        <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">Release Date</Data></Cell>
        <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">Price</Data></Cell>
      </Row>
    <% @products.each do |product| %>
      <Row>
        <Cell><Data ss:Type="Number"><%= product.id %></Data></Cell>
        <Cell><Data ss:Type="String"><%= product.name %></Data></Cell>
        <Cell><Data ss:Type="String"><%= product.released_on %></Data></Cell>
        <Cell><Data ss:Type="Number"><%= product.price %></Data></Cell>
      </Row>
    <% end %>
    </Table>
  </Worksheet>
</Workbook>

This approach may help us overcome limitations in performance and styling that we encountered with the spreadsheet gem.