write reports to word(both doc and rtf) and excel

Question

I have no background in reporting tools.

I'd like to generate some statistical tables and plots. Is VSTO(Visual Studio Tools for Office) good enough for this task? What's the main difference VSTO tool chains and other reporting tools, like crystal-reporting.

Answer 1

VSTO is meant to be a MS Office type file generation system. You can generate office files (Excel, Word, etc) using VSTO and use their formatting capabilities (which, in most cases are beyond most reporting systems). VSTO comes with Visual Studio.

Crystal Reports, SQL Server Reports, etc are purely reporting utilities. You will have to buy Crystal (or similar) reporting tools.

For basic stat sheets and graphs / plots, you can do Excel with VSTO and you should get pretty satisfactory output.

Answer 2

There's OpenXML SDK from Microsoft as well, if you're using Office 2007. You definitely should take a look at it.