Implementing Roo gem in Rails 3

Roo gem allows us to access the contents of

Open-office spreadsheets (.ods)

• Excel spreadsheets (.xls)
• Google (online) spreadsheets
• Excel’s new file format .xlsx

Following is a basic example to demonstrate how to read the datas from an excel sheet and save to your database.Suppose you have an excel sheet named student_details.xls which contain the student details such as “Name”,”Phone”,”Address”.We have to save them in our database but it will take a huge time if we insert them manually.Here we can user “roo” gem to fetch the datas from excel sheet and save to database in a fly.
Step – 1
Add the gem in your gem file
gem ‘roo’
Then run the ‘bundle install‘
Step – 2
Place your excel sheet in the rails application such as in public folder.
Step – 3
Now its time to change your controller like below.

• Add the following line in your controller

require ‘roo’

• Create a new method where you will fetch the data from excel sheet and save it in your database.

def fetch_excel_data

ex = Excel.new(“#{Rails.root}/public/student_details.xls”)
ex.default_sheet = ex.sheets[1] #Mention the sheet number
3.upto(1000) do |line| #start and end of row
name = ex.cell(line,’A’)
phone = ex.cell(line,’B’)
adr = ex.cell(line,’C’)
@student = Student.create(:name => name,:phone => phone,:address => adr)
end

end

usefullink :https://github.com/zenkay/simple-spreadsheet 
http://railscasts.com/episodes/396-importing-csv-and-excel?view=asciicast