The web_spreadsheet.rb is a little ruby application that reads all of the Excel documents in the present working directory and displays their contents on a web page.

It is pretty minimal, and can be expanded upon as you see fit. Currently it displays any spreadsheets I tested without issue. I started down the path of being able to retrieve specific cells and also to set values to specific cells. The general idea was to allow users in an enterprisey environment to share spreadsheet data and functionality without losing control of the spreadsheet itself...

I think there was some issue with Excel processes hanging around, so I kill them all occasionally. Moral of the story, don't be running this server and working on a spreadsheet at the same time. Unintended results might otherwise ensue :).

Since it uses Windows OLE, it needs to run on Windows and requires an Excel install. Not bad for 150 lines of code though.