How to build an Angular Excel (XLS/XLSX) viewer

This article was first published in November 2023 and was updated in October 2024.

In this blog post, you’ll learn how to build an Angular Excel viewer using the Nutrient Web SDK. You’ll open and view XLS and XLSX files directly in your web browser using client-side processing (no server required).

The image below shows what you’ll be building.

You can see a demo of this feature in action.

Opening and rendering Office documents in the browser

Nutrient Web SDK brings support for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint formats to your application, without you or your users needing any MS Office software, MS Office licenses, or third-party open source software. The technology works by converting an Office document to PDF directly in the browser, and the document is then rendered in our JavaScript viewer.

Unlocking more capabilities with Office-to-PDF conversion

​​By converting an Office document to PDF using client-side JavaScript, you have the option to support a rich array of additional Office document functionality, such as:

• Text editing — Edit text directly in the displayed Office document.

• Page manipulation — Organize documents by adding, removing, or rearranging pages.

• Annotations — Boost collaboration by adding text highlights, comments, or stamps.

• Adding signatures — Draw, type, or upload a signature directly to an Office document.

Explore Demo

Creating a new Angular project

Now you’ll see how to integrate Nutrient into your Angular project.

First, create a new Angular project for the Nutrient integration:

ng new pspdfkit-word-example

This will ask some configuration questions. Choose No for routing and CSS for the stylesheet. Now, change your directory to this project:

cd pspdfkit-word-example

Adding Nutrient

Install pspdfkit as a dependency with npm or yarn:

npm install pspdfkit

yarn add pspdfkit

Add the following to your angular.json file. Angular will copy the Nutrient library assets to the assets directory before running your app:

"assets": [
 "src/favicon.ico",
  "src/assets",
   {
   	"glob": "**/*",
		"input": "./node_modules/pspdfkit/dist/pspdfkit-lib/",
		"output": "./assets/pspdfkit-lib/"
	}
]

Displaying an Excel document

1. Add the Excel (XLS, XLSX) document you want to display to the src/assets directory. You can use our demo document as an example.

2. Replace the contents of app.component.html with the following:

<div class="app">
	<!-- We'll mount the Nutrient UI to this element. -->
	<div id="pspdfkit-container"></div>
</div>

2. Replace the contents of app.component.ts with the following:

import { Component } from '@angular/core';
import PSPDFKit from 'pspdfkit';

@Component({
	selector: 'app-root',
	templateUrl: './app.component.html',
	styleUrls: ['app.component.css'],
	standalone: true,
})
export class AppComponent {
	title = 'PSPDFKit for Web Angular Example';

	ngAfterViewInit() {
		PSPDFKit.load({
			// Use the assets directory URL as a base URL. Nutrient will download its library assets from here.
			baseUrl: location.protocol + '//' + location.host + '/assets/',
			document: '/assets/chart.xlsx',
			container: '#pspdfkit-container',
		}).then((instance) => {
			// For the sake of this demo, store the Nutrient Web SDK instance
			// on the global object so that you can open the dev tools and
			// play with the Nutrient API.
			(window as any).instance = instance;
		});
	}
}

The license key is optional; however, you may see a watermark on your images without a key. To get a key, contact Sales.

If you try to run your project, you may get an error stating the mounting container has no height. To fix this issue, add the following styles to the src/app/app.component.css file:

:host {
	height: 100%;
}

.app {
	position: fixed;
	width: 100%;
	height: 100%;
	top: 0;
	right: 0;
	bottom: 0;
	left: 0;
}

.toolbar {
	position: relative;
	display: flex;
	align-items: center;
	height: 64px;
	width: 100%;
	padding: 0 24px;
	box-shadow: 0 1px 0 rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1);
	font-family: sans-serif;
	font-size: 20px;
	font-weight: 500;
	color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8);
}

.logo {
	margin-right: 20px;
}

#pspdfkit-container {
	height: calc(100% - 64px);
}

Start the app and open it in your default browser:

npm start

yarn start

A Note about fonts

When you convert an Office document with custom fonts to a PDF, Nutrient Web SDK might not have access to these fonts due to licensing constraints. In this case, Nutrient typically replaces unavailable fonts with their equivalents — like Arial with Noto.

Adding even more capabilities

Once you’ve deployed your viewer, you can start customizing it to meet your specific requirements or easily add more capabilities. To help you get started, here are some of our most popular Angular guides:

• Instant synchronization
• Document assembly
• Page manipulation
• Editor
• Forms
• Signatures
• Redaction
• Document security

Conclusion

In this blog post, you learned how to build an Excel viewer using Angular with the Nutrient Web SDK. It also discussed the benefits of using Nutrient Web SDK to render Office documents in the browser. If you hit any snags, don’t hesitate to reach out to our Support team for help.

You can also integrate our Angular Excel viewer using web frameworks like Vue.js and React.js. To see a list of all web frameworks, start your free trial. Or, launch our demo to see our viewer in action.