Write to certain cells in Excel spreadsheet without using Excel?

Question

I would like to write to an Excel spreadsheet on a server which doesn't have Excel installed. So Excel automation is not possible. I also need to write to certain cells using .NET. Is this possible and how? Can the ODBC driver be used to insert data at certain sheet cells? Without using expensive third party libraries.

Answer 1

I've used with success the following open source projects:

• ExcelPackage for OOXML formats (Office 2007)

• NPOI for .XLS format (Office 2003)

Take a look at my blog posts. They show you what you're looking for:

Creating Excel spreadsheets .XLS and .XLSX in C#

NPOI with Excel Table and dynamic Chart

Answer 2

There's also Koogra:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/koogra/

This library reads the Excel file in its native format (BIFF), also works with XSLX format as well.