Proposal for Native Microsoft Excel Export and Printing in FET

[Alami mohammed]

Dear Mr. Liviu,

First of all, I would like to thank you once again for your continuous efforts in developing FET. It is an outstanding and highly reliable timetabling software that has become an essential tool for many educational institutions around the world.

I would like to suggest a feature that I believe would be extremely useful for many FET users: native Microsoft Excel (.xlsx) export and printing.

Currently, FET provides excellent output formats such as HTML and PDF, which are very useful. However, many schools and administrators still rely heavily on Microsoft Excel to review, customize, format, and print timetables before distributing them.

Therefore, I suggest adding Excel (.xlsx) as an additional output format alongside HTML and PDF.

Ideally, this option could be integrated directly into both:

the Timetable View window,

and the Print/Export window,


where the user could simply choose the desired output format:

HTML

PDF

Excel (.xlsx)


The generated Excel files could preserve the current timetable layout, including merged cells, colors, borders, fonts, and page formatting as much as possible, making them immediately ready for printing or further editing.

This feature would provide several important advantages:

Allow users to make final formatting adjustments directly in Excel.

Simplify the preparation of printed timetables according to each institution's preferences.

Enable easy integration with existing Excel-based administrative workflows.

Save users a significant amount of time, since many currently convert HTML files into Excel manually.


I believe that native Excel export would be a valuable addition to FET and would be appreciated by a large number of users worldwide, especially in educational institutions where Excel is the standard tool for document preparation.

Thank you once again for your excellent work and for your dedication to continuously improving FET.

With my highest respect and best regards,

Mohammed Alami

[Volker Dirr]

Thank you for suggestion. Not easy without support.

I guess it will be possible for teachers, rooms and subgroups timetables as long as there is only a single activity per html cell. It will be difficult (impossible?!) as soon as there are more then 1 activity in an html cell; like in groups and years timetables. So it will be hard/difficult to convert that into Excel.

Maybe you can also add some more words how to export the many timetable variants that FET supports. I guess each html file as an Excel file. But in a single file are a lot of tables. All tables into a single sheet OR each single table into an own sheet? How to care about cell with more than 1 activity?

[Liviu Lalescu]

Dear Mr. Mohammed,

Thank you for your kind words!

I'll add your words in the TODO.

But: We prefer to promote the use of free software.