The best 3rd party component for generating Excel spreadsheets from ASP.NET?

Question

I want to generate simple excel spreadsheets with only tabular data that opens in excel when the user clicks a button or a link on a asp.net page. I would like suggestions of good 3rd party components that generates the excel file.

A must: native 97-2003 xls files, simple, not expensive.

Don't want: office automation, csv/html/text-solutions (due to annoying security warnings in Vista)

Answer 1

Try Aspose.Cells. It's good!

Answer 2

SpreadsheetGear will read / write native Excel and execute formulas without requiring that Excel be installed on your server. It's about $1000 for a developers license with unlimited distribution.

Answer 3

OWC works well

You may also be able to hook into the MS Jet engine (its old, but will let you do xls formats)

Answer 4

My answer from a very similar question: TMS Flexcel Studio

They are 129 EUR per developer or 500 EUR for site license

Answer 5

You can also use Office Open XML formats. These are straight XML files so you can use XmlTextWriter or XElement in ASP.NET. Check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338205.aspx

Answer 6

We went with http://www.tmssoftware.com/site/flexcelnet.asp">TMS Flexcel Studio. It's easy to use for simple stuff and comes at a good price for a site license. For advanced formatting you use a separate sheet which is a bit funky. The documentation is alright.

Answer 7

I use Syncfusion's XlsIO. Quite happy with it.

"XlsIO can be used to generate a new XLS document from scratch, extract data from an existing spreadsheet document or even edit an existing spreadsheet."

• numerous formatting options are available for customizing the look and feel of the cells in the worksheet.
• advanced support for working with Formulas in cells.
• advanced support for manipulating the worksheet.
• has APIs for reading and writing comments for cells in a worksheet.
• advanced support for creating and modifying Excel charts inside a workbook.
• high performance for generating Excel files with large number of rows and columns.
• can work with spreadsheets that are stored as streams and can also save to a stream.
• Excel 2007 Support