I appreciate all the kind interest in this topic. I will set the
difficulty warnings aside for now because I believe the potential
benefits of this approach are worth some effort.

Thanks to Pavel Ptacek's xsl-excel-engine [1], recommended by Vincent
Lizzi, I was able to get a leg up on this effort.

See below for an Xproc pipeline definition that creates a minimal blank
spreadsheet (.xlsx) that can be opened without incident in Excel 2007.
It uses the Exproc [2] extension step pxp:zip (as implemented in
calabash [3]) to produce the xlsx package.

Apologies to those who don't speak xproc, and further apologies since
there is not a line of xslt in it. But imagine that any of the
input[@port='source']/inline elements in the <pxp:zip> step can be
replaced with the results of whatever transformations you like, and this
becomes a very powerful tool. In particular, it should be
straightforward to transform an fo:table to a workbook sheet.

Regards,
--Paul

[1] https://github.com/foglcz/xsl-excel-engine
[2] http://exproc.org/
[3] http://xmlcalabash.com/

Run with calabash like:

> java -jar calabash.jar ooxml.xpl
output-file=file://path/to/output.xlsx

============== ooxml.xpl ===============
<declare-step name="ooxml-proc"
	      xmlns="http://www.w3.org/ns/xproc"
	      xmlns:pxp="http://exproc.org/proposed/steps"
	      version="1.0">

  <option name="output-file"/>

  <output port="result" primary="true"/>
  <serialization port="result" indent="true"/>

  <import
href="http://xmlcalabash.com/extension/steps/library-1.0.xpl"/>

  <pxp:zip command="create">
    <with-option name="href"
		 select="$output-file"/>
    <input port="source">
      <inline xml:base="http://example.org/sheet1">
	<worksheet
	    xmlns="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/spreadsheetml/2006/main">
	  <sheetData />
	</worksheet>
      </inline>
      <inline xml:base="http://example.org/workbook">
	<workbook

xmlns:r="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/relationships"
	    xmlns="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/spreadsheetml/2006/main">
	  <sheets>
	    <sheet name="Sheet1" sheetId="1" r:id="rId1"/>
	  </sheets>
	</workbook>
      </inline>
      <inline xml:base="http://example.org/content-types">
	<Types
xmlns="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/package/2006/content-types">
	  <Default Extension="rels"
ContentType="application/vnd.openxmlformats-package.relationships+xml"/>
	  <Default Extension="xml" ContentType="application/xml"/>
	  <Override
	      PartName="/workbook.xml"

ContentType="application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.shee
t.main+xml"/>
	  <Override
	      PartName="/sheet1.xml"

ContentType="application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.work
sheet+xml"/>
	</Types>
      </inline>
      <inline xml:base="http://example.org/package-rels">
	<Relationships
xmlns="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/package/2006/relationships">
	  <Relationship
	      Id="rId1"

Type="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/relationships/off
iceDocument"
	      Target="workbook.xml"/>
	</Relationships>
      </inline>
      <inline xml:base="http://example.org/workbook-rels">
	<Relationships
xmlns="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/package/2006/relationships">
	  <Relationship
	      Id="rId1"

Type="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/relationships/wor
ksheet"
	      Target="sheet1.xml"/>
	</Relationships>
      </inline>
    </input>
    <input port="manifest">
      <inline>
	<zip-manifest xmlns="http://www.w3.org/ns/xproc-step">
	  <entry name="sheet1.xml" href="http://example.org/sheet1"/>
	  <entry name="workbook.xml" href="http://example.org/workbook"/>
	  <entry name="[Content_Types].xml"
href="http://example.org/content-types"/>
	  <entry name="_rels/.rels" href="http://example.org/package-rels"/>
	  <entry name="_rels/workbook.xml.rels"
href="http://example.org/workbook-rels"/>
	</zip-manifest>
      </inline>
    </input>
  </pxp:zip>

</declare-step>
================== end of file ===============



On Fri, 2014-07-25 at 13:51 +0000, Eliot Kimber ekimber@xxxxxxxxxxxx
wrote:
> If you can use Java, the Apache POI library makes reading and writing MS
> Office formats about as easy as it can be. I've successfully used the
> libraries to read and write non-trivial Excel spreadsheets and also to
> generate Powerpoint slides (although the current support for Powerpoint is
> less complete than for Excel). It would be a significant development
> effort to build equivalent infrastructure in XSLT and I would be loath to
> take it on.
>
> For powerpoint generation I used the technique of using an intermediate
> XML format that abstracts slides and then Java code that transforms that
> XML into Powerpoint using the POI library. That makes it possible to use
> XSLT to generate the slide content but avoids having to deal with the
> Office Open complexity in XSLT. The code is the The Slidinator project on
> Github (https://github.com/drmacro/slidinator).
>
> Cheers,
>
> E.
> bbbbb
> Eliot Kimber, Owner
> Contrext, LLC
> http://contrext.com
>
>
>
>
> On 7/25/14, 7:28 AM, "Nicolas BUONOMO nicolas.buonomo@xxxxxxxxxxx"
> <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> >Hi,
> >
> >You can also generating Open Document spreedsheets (xls) and then convert
> >them to xlsx document with
> >libreoffice for exemple.
> >I think that generating Open Document Format is more easy than generating
> >Office Open XML. I have do it in
> >some simple case.
> >
> >Nicolas
> >
> >On 25/07/2014 03:02, Paul Tyson phtyson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> >> Does anyone know of success stories in generating Office Open XML
> >> artifacts using XSLT?
> >>
> >> (This is the "open" format used by Microsoft Office since 2007,
> >> standardized in ISO/IEC 29500 and ECMA-376.)
> >>
> >> I am looking for pointers to solid documentation of namespaces and
> >> package structure, particularly for SpreadsheetML (Microsoft's .xlsx
> >> format) as used in Excel 2007.
> >>
> >> Thanks in advance,
> >> --Paul
> >>
> >>
> >
> >--
> >Nicolas BUONOMO
> >CNAF - CNEDI RhC4ne Alpes
> >DSI - Direction Fonctionnelle et Processus
> >Relation avec les CollectivitC)s Territoriales
> >TC)l : 0478636669 / 0677877811
> >MC)l : nicolas.buonomo@xxxxxxxxxxx