When creating a website that generates reports, having the ability to generate Excel spreadsheets is a great feature to offer users. Allowing people to provide an Excel file of data rather than forcing them to manually enter everything into your system is also a great feature for users. ColdFusion allows for both the creation and reading of spreadsheets.
ColdFusion offers the ability to use tags and functions to manipulate spreadsheets. The cfspreadsheet tag is best used when reading in a spreadsheet; the spreadsheet functions are best used when manipulating the spreadsheet. There is the SpreadsheetRead function available to you, but it does not return the data contained in the spreadsheet. For this section, we will use the cfspreadsheet tag to read in data, but will use the spreadsheet functions for creation and manipulation.