Using Microsoft Office Interop to create and parse Excel spreadsheets from ASP.NET

Question

I have a new ASP.NET MVC project that has two requirements that require using the Office Interop DLLs to generate Excel spreadsheet files in Excel 2003 format by combining several template files into a multi-sheet workbook and to parse these files once filled in. The files we parse may come back in Excel 2003, 2007 or 2010 format (I believe 2007 and 2010 file formats are identical but feel free to correct me on that).

I'd be much happier if we could convince the (internal) clients to drop this requirement. They have been made aware of the risks in this type of work and still want to go ahead so now I'm looking for good references to help get us started and have had some trouble narrowing down the correct keywords to search for.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Using Excel interop on the server is a reallyy bad idea. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257757

Alternatives are:

Open source

Excel 2003

• ExcelLibrary http://code.google.com/p/excellibrary/downloads/list
  • Note from another commenter:

  • ExcelLibrary has been superseded by the exceptional EPPlus - epplus.codeplex.com. Jan updates it regularly. Have been using it and it is one of the finest open source projects we've worked with. – Mark A Nov 4 '10 at 0:11

• NPOI http://npoi.codeplex.com/

Excel 2007

• ExcelPackage http://excelpackage.codeplex.com/

Commercial

• Aspose Cells http://www.aspose.com/categories/.net-components/aspose.cells-for-.net/default.aspx