how to create and download excel document using asp.net

Question

How to create and download excel document using asp.net ?

The purpose is to use xml, linq or whatever to send an excel document to a customer via a browser.

Edit : Use case

The customer load a gridview ( made with ajax framework ) in a browser, the gridview is directly linked to an sql database. I put a button 'export to excel' to let customer save this gridview data on his computer ansd i would like to launch a clean download of an excel.

The solutions proposed here are not clean, like send an html document and change the header to excel document etc, i'm searching a simple solution on codeplex right now, i will let you know.

Answer 1

Kindly refer to the following good post:

Reading and Writing Excel Spreadsheets Using ADO.NET C# DbProviderFactory

http://davidhayden.com/blog/dave/archive/2006/05/26/2973.aspx

Answer 2

just set Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-excel" and your page will rendered as an excel sheet on the clients browser

Sample code here

Answer 3

There are quite a few ways of handling this, depending on how extensive the Excel functionality is. Binoj's answer works if the Excel is just a spreadsheet and has no direct Excel functionality built in. The client can add functionality, concats, etc. These are "dumb" excel docs until the client does soemthing.

To create a more full featured Excel doc, you havve two basic choices that I can think of offhand.

1. Use either the office components (re: bad) to create an excel document, or a third party component, like SoftArtisan's ExcelWriter. Great component, but there is a cost.

2. Use a control on the page that allows export to Excel. Most vendors of ASSP.NET controls have this functionality on their grids.

Option #1 allows you pretty much all functionality of Excel. Option #2 is a bit more limited, at least in the controls I have tried.

Answer 4

Good article on how top export to excel from Erika Ehrli http://blogs.msdn.com/erikaehrli/archive/2009/01/30/how-to-export-data-to-excel-from-an-asp-net-application-avoid-the-file-format-differ-prompt.aspx