Export Excel from web, what's the BEST way?

Question

About 3 years ago, I was looking for a way to allow a web app user to download table results to an Excel file. I knew that I didn't want to put Office on the web server and that I probably wanted to create the XLS file in XML format. The question was: what was the best way?

Now I am writing my resume and I am trying to recap the things that I did and I am concerned that I didn't take the best approach and I am wondering if somebody can tell me whether my suspicions are true.

Basically, I saved an Excel file as XML and then looked at the contents of the saved file and reverse engineered what I thought was a pretty cool SDK to create an Excel file in XML format. It was fairly robust with options , nice object model, etc.

But did such a library already exist? One that I could have used? I want to know if I will need to defend this "accomplishment"

Also, could anyone recommend me a good place where I can see actual resumes of people with .NET / SQL Server or general developer skills?

Answer 1

These people wrote a perfectly good one that you probably couldn't implement yourself for as cheaply.

Answer 2

You can try SmartXLS (for Java or .Net), it supports most features of Excel (cell formatting, Charts, formulas, pivot tables etc), and can read/write both the Excel97-2003 xls format and the Excel2007 openxml format.