For a couple of minutes today I was in a situation where I might have to support uploading and processing Microsoft Excel files without having access to the COM component. One option is to create a Datasource in the CF administrator - but that isn’t very flexible since I need to be able to upload many, many files and each might be named different etc.

So, I started searching for an alternate and found the customtag cfx_excel2qu ery. Using java it loads your excel file into a CF query object. It has a couple of parameters including use the first row as header information (very useful to me). The tag hasn’t been updated since february of last year but it is documented to work with CF MX (as well as 4.5+). Plus, for those that may not have installed a cfx tag before it comes with instructions for that as well.

Overall it looks like it would be pretty handy. If you have used it before and have an opinion of it please leave a comment.