Excel ODBC on 64-bit - again

Question

I fear this has been beaten to death, but I'm still struggling with the problem of reading Excel files in my ASP.NET application that has recently been ported to Server 2008 and 64-bit.

Many posts I find point to the existence of 64-bit Microsoft drivers here:

here and here.

My concern is the warnings I'm also reading about these not intended "As a replacement for the Jet OLEDB Provider in server-side applications" possibly for thread-safe reasons? This IS a server-side application and while Excel uploads aren't hundreds-of-times-a-day ocurrances, they will be done by customers.

I know there are also commercial libraries available and while I'm opening to considering them I do worry about the 'revision chase' and not getting burned by them going belly-up (it has happened to us before).

So, IS there a thread-safe, server-safe way to read Excel files in 64 bits?

And before you suggest .CSV, I have a hard enough time getting customers to send me reasonably-formatted Excel files, let alone asking them to export to a .csv.

Oh, and to add yet-another-requirement, I really don't want to run the whole application 32-bit.

Answer 1

You may be able to hook into a Java library such as this:

http://jexcelapi.sourceforge.net/

Answer 2

I have no affiliation with these guys: SpreadsheetGear but their tool completely solved my problem. Wicked fast and server-wide formula evaluation. VERY cool.