Create Excel files from C# without office [duplicate]

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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 & 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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

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.