asp.net(c#) Create Excel Worksheet, do i need Excel installed on the server?

Question

Hello.

I have created an application that uses Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel, in my local and testing environments everything worked fine, but the app does not work in the production environment.

Turns out I have Office installed locally, as does the Test server, however, the production server does not have Excel installed.

I really can't go back and change my code, however, I would really not like to have to install Excel on the production server.

Do I have any other options other than installing Office Excel on the production server to get the application working?

Thanks, Appreciate your assistance. Steven

Answer 1

Office Interop does require that Office be installed on the server.

In the more general case, you do not need Excel to create worksheets, and you should avoid any solution that requires it for web use. That includes office interop: it doesn't scale in a web environment.

See this question for more options:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/150339/generating-an-excel-file-in-asp-net

Answer 2

The Excel interop libraries work by opening the Excel application in the background to process the spreadsheet. So without updating your code, you will need to have Excel installed on the server. However using interop is a very slow and error prone solution to working with Excel from ASP.NET, the link Joel gave provides several good alternatives.