Use Excel for calculations in web app

Question

Hi

I've inherited a large Excel spreadsheet that does some financial calculation magic using any number of simulation tables, and have been asked to write a web application as a front end. Now I could spend endless hours trying to figure out the sheet, or I could call the excel sheet from my web app. I seem to need the Office Primary Interop Assemblies, but do I also need to install office/excel on the web server? How can I handle multiple simultaneous requests to the same sheet? Is this approach even possible?

Answer 1

Excel is a desktop Application (and a very good one) and not designed for either multiple users or deployment in a web application. You might be able to cobble something together but you are likely to have to write a lot of code to manage the design features of a desktop app which are inadequacies in a web app.

You are better off trying to understand what the Excel workbook is doing and simulating it in code with the desired multi-user features in mind which must have been beneath the request for a web app. If you have access to the current users and/or author you should be able to document the requirement and you have the Excel workbook for you to test your algorithm against once you have understood it.

Best of luck.

Answer 2

Take a look at SpreadsheetGear. Ordinarily it is used to generate new spreadsheets, but it has a calculation engine for existing spreadsheets too. And unlike Excel, it was designed for a server environment.

Spreadsheet Gear

Answer 3

We have implement a project where we call several Excel spreadsheets from a web app.

We use Sharepoint Excel Services to do this. It has worked very well for us.

In our case our largest spreadsheet has over 300 input parameters, 1000 formuals and 50 results. This takes about 0.5 seconds, where most of that time is moving data in and out of excel services via a web service.

The main draw back in using Sharepoint Excel Services is the cost. However, in our case the saving in development time far out weighed the cost.

Answer 4

Not sure if this is appropriate to your task, but could you not import it into Google Spreadsheets to make it multi-user? If it is really complicated then I shouldn't think this will work, but might be worth a try.

Answer 5

You can try SmartXLS for .net,it has a calculation engine for Excel workbook,it does not depend on Excel.