I have just gone through a very frustrating weeklong experience, trying to imbed a VIABLE 2010 Excel Spreadsheet URL into my WordPress.com blog. There is no trouble imbedding the Excel spreadsheet (.xlsx) URL into the new post. The trouble is, when you click on the URL (in the WordPress blog Review mode), the new post in WordPress does not recognize or display the Spreadsheet with its .xlsx extension (If you have discovered how to do this, let me know.) So how do you produce a VIABLE 2010 Excel Spreadsheet URL in WordPress? You can’t, to my knowledge, in the .xlsx format. You must first convert the Excel spreadsheet into a PDF (Portable Document Format). After first doing this, then imbed the PDF URL into the new post, review it, click on the URL, and it will display the spreadsheet in its PDF form. Yes! (The displayed form of the PDF depends on how you configure your original spreadsheet, as a whole spreadsheet (with no page breaks) which gives you both horizontal as well as vertical scroll bars when you zoom in on it in the PDF, or in page form as a result of freezing certain rows and columns and having page breaks in the original spreadsheet.)
How do you do this? This is what I did, using 2010 Excel:
1. I put the spreadsheet in the form that I wanted it to be printed in, with “page breaks” and “frozen” rows and columns on the left and on the top of the spreadsheet as appropriate to my purposes. (Note: Doing this results in the PDF being displayed in multiple page form.) But if you just want to keep the spreadsheet in a “whole” (my word) form, without page breaks or frozen rows or columns, this is OK too. (You will need to “Zoom In” on the final product inside the PDF. See below.)
2. I next converted the 2010 Excel spreadsheet, right within the 2010 edition of Excel, into a PDF by using the “Save and Send” feature under the “File” pull-down menu at the top left of your Excel screen. Click on the “Create PDF/XPS Document” command, follow the procedure given, and then save the PDF file where you want it. (If you can’t make a PDF within your version of Excel, then use whatever means you have to do this. You may have to download a free online PDF-creator program, or use Adobe Acrobat to do so, but you will have to pay for this service.)
3. Finally embed the new PDF of your Excel spreadsheet into your WordPress blog “new post” as per normal procedures:
a. Use the “Add Media” button on top of the WordPress “new post” toolbar (top left) to “Upload” your PDF’s URL into your new post. Click on the “Select Files” button which will allow you to open the Excel PDF file where you saved it. Then fill out the form given, and click on the “Upload URL into your new post” button.
b. You will immediaely be taken to the new post and you will see the imbedded PDF URL of your Excel spreadsheet. Then press the “Preview” button (upper right of the page) and you will be taken to the PDF form of your spreadsheet! Yes! (Now, when the viewers or followers of your blog click on the PDF URL in your blog post, they will be taken to that Excel spreadsheet, in PDF form, to observe the information you have provided within it.)
c. Note 1: Once within the PDF, you may use the PDF buttons to Zoom In or Zoom Out on your document. You can press the “Up or Down Arrow” button to go to the next or previous page in your PDF Excel spreadsheet.
d. Note 2: If your Excel spreadsheet is formated as a “whole” document (my word) (without page breaks or “frozen” rows or columns), then when you “Zoom In” on that PDF document, you will see horizontal and vertical scroll bars appear that allow you and your viewers to pan horizontally or vertically within the data and information of your spreadsheet. (However, as you do so, you will lose view of the left-most or top-most information as you scroll to the right or scroll down, and visa versa.)
I hope this is helpful to you and saves you the frustration that I went through. WordPress.com Forum did not provide any help to me with this problem. Also, there didn’t seem to be any on-line article, via Google, that addressed the solution to this issue as specifically as I needed. Thus, the reason for this article. I suppose not too many bloggers are interested in embedding (larger) spreadsheets, via URL links, into their blogs. They may just be satisfied with placing the spreadsheet into a Word document first, then imbedding that document into their blog post. But this only would work if you had a very small spreadsheet.
