Create Excel files from C without office

Question

I am writing a program that generates excel reports  currently using the Microsoft Interop Excel reference   My dev computer has Excel on it  but the end user may or may not have Office installed   Will this tool fail if Office isn t installed on the end users computer  or is this interop service separate from the actual application

User · Answer

If you re interested in making  xlsx  Office 2007 and beyond  files  you re in luck  Office 2007  uses OpenXML which for lack of a more apt description is XML files inside of a zip named  xlsx  Take an excel file  2007   and rename it to  zip  you can open it up and take a look  If you re using  NET 3 5 you can use the System IO Packaging library to manipulate the relationships  amp  zipfile itself  and linq to xml to play with the xml  or just DOM if you re more comfortable    Otherwise id reccomend DotNetZip  a powerfull library for manipulation of zipfiles   OpenXMLDeveloper has lots of resources about OpenXML and you can find more there   If you want  xls  2003 and below  you re going to have to look into 3rd party libraries or perhaps learn the file format yourself to achieve this without excel installed

User · Answer

Use OleDB  you can create  read  and edit excel files pretty easily   Read the MSDN docs for more info   http   msdn microsoft com en-us library aa288452 VS 71  aspx  I ve used OleDB to read from excel files and I know you can create them  but I haven t done it firsthand

User · Answer

Try EPPlus if you use Excel 2007  Supports ranges  cellstyling  charts  shapes  pictures and a lot of other stuff

User · Answer

There are a handful of options    NPOI - Which is free and open source   Aspose - Is definitely not free but robust   Spreadsheet ML - Basically XML for creating spreadsheets    Using the Interop will require that the Excel be installed on the machine from which it is running  In a server side solution  this will be awful  Instead  you should use a tool like the ones above that lets you build an Excel file without Excel being installed    If the user does not have Excel but has a tool that will read Excel  like Open Office   then obviously they will be able to open it  Microsoft has a free Excel viewer available for those users that do not have Excel

User · Answer

An interop calls something else  it s an interoperability assembly  so you re inter-operating with something   in this case Excel  the actual installed Excel   In this case yes  it will fail to run because it depends on excel  you re just calling excel functions   If they don t have it installed   out of luck   There are methods to generate without Excel  provided the 2007 file format is ok  here s a few    http   excelpackage codeplex com  http   simpleooxml codeplex com    as I said though  this is the 2007 format  normally if anything  that s the deal-breaker

User · Answer

You could use the ExcelStorage Class of the FileHelpers library  it s very easy and simple    you will need Excel 2000 or later installed on the machine      The FileHelpers is a free and easy to   use   NET library to import export    data from fixed length or delimited   records in files  strings or streams

User · Answer

Unless you have Excel installed on the Server PC or use an external tool  which is possible without using Excel Interop  see Create Excel   XLS and  XLSX  file from C    it will fail  Using the interop requires Excel to be installed

[c#] Create Excel files from C# without office

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