Working with Zip and ExcelXmlWriter - 4.11 Generating Excel Files from Code Using ExcelXmlWriter (Without Having Excel!)
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Excel is a ubiquitous tool, used for everything from simple tabular-format databases to complex statistical analyses. In fact, it is so widely used that in some cases it makes perfect sense to be able to save your application’s data out to a workbook so users can easily work with it in Excel.
Carlos Aguilar Mares of Microsoft, formerly on the ASP.NET development team for .NET 2.0, has developed two tools that make it very simple to get your application’s data into Excel using its XML workbook format. ExcelXmlWriter is a freely available DLL with a rich API supporting many of Excel’s advanced features, such as pivot tables, sorting, and filtering. ExcelXmlWriter.Generator is a utility that will quickly generate the logic necessary to reverse-engineer an existing Excel file, with all its data and formatting intact. The Generator drastically cuts the time needed to build code for using complex workbooks.
Mares’s tools are completely standalone; you don’t need to have Excel or Office on the system hosting your application.
ExcelXmlWriter at a Glance
Tool | ExcelXmlWriter |
Version covered | 1.0.0.6 |
Home page | http://www.carlosag.net/Tools/ExcelXmlWriter/Default.aspx |
Power Tools page | http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/152 |
Summary | Generate Excel files from any data source. Online code-generation tool greatly simplifies creation of classes. |
License type | Freeware, no specific license |
Online resources | Email |
Supported Frameworks | .NET 2.0 |
Getting Started
Download the tool from its home page. The distribution is a .zip file containing an assembly you’ll need to reference in your application. The ExcelXmlWriter.Generator application is a standalone app that you can drop in any convenient directory. Mares’s tools also include an API documentation help file, which you can download from his web site.
Next: Using ExcelXmlWriter >>
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