I am interested in writing an application that will take in an excel document of a specific format, massage the data and create a new Excel document that has different formatting.
I am curious if anyone can recommend a good place to start on this.
My first thought was to write something my self in C#. I came across this tool on codeplex:
http://excelwrapperdotnet.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Usage%20-%20Example&referringTitle=Documentation
But it appears to only be for Excel 2007.
Is there a best practice for doing this type of thing for Excel 2010 documents? Do I even need to program something custom to do this or does Excel offer something that might handle this?
Another nice library to modify Excel 2007/2010 documents (.xlsx) is EPPlus. It gives you a nice object model on your spreadsheets.
Excel files (.xslx) are archived XML files. They use 'Open XML', take a look here MICROSOFT Open XML
That should get you going on the right path.
Related
I am generating CSV data from a C# application. This can be imported into Excel easily but I need formatting applied to the file.
One option is interop but the machine running this application will not have Office products installed so that is out.
I've been told that XML can work with Excel templates and am looking for a starter example on how to achieve this.
I have generated excel spread sheets using the excel 2003 xml format several times but you will have to consider the following features that cannot be supported using this format:
This XML Spreadsheet 2003 file format (.xml) does not retain the following features:
Auditing tracer arrows
Chart and other graphic objects
Chart sheets, macro sheets, dialog sheets
Custom views
Data consolidation references
Drawing object layers
Outlining and grouping features
Password-protected worksheet data
Scenarios
User-defined function categories
VBA projects
If that is acceptable you can use as someone suggest an open source library that allows you to generate the spreadsheet in code or as I have done you can generate the xml using either an xml transform or a using the spark template engine. Both have worked for me in the past but using the spark view engine was probably the nicest.
The best way to achieve either of these is to create a template the way you want it to look and save it as a Excel 2003 Xml format and look at the raw xml. This should make it easy for you to generate your output. You can also download the xml definition for reference.
You can use excellent OpenXML wrapper ClosedXML to generate xlsx files with formatting. Or if you want, you can use pure OpenXML. OpenXML installation is required for ClosedXML to work.
I need to make the information in the database usable by allowing the user to download it as a PDF or Excel spreadsheet (either one works, both is perfect).
I've looked around at a bunch of options, but I really can't decide which one I should use, let alone if any of those options are actually useful. Most of the options I've found revolve around converting already existing HTML files into PDFs which is not what I need. Also, it needs to be free. My bosses haven't given me a budget to spend on this
I'm not sure what other information I should include here.
Well, any help is greatly appreciated. If you have questions about missing information, I'll get it posted ASAP. I'm here all day, so I'll be able to respond to any comments very quickly.
EDIT: Oh wow! Huge thanks, guys, for the massive response! I got a ton of ideas. This is super-helpful. Thanks!
if you want to generate an Excel (or also a Word) you can use openXml. You can create a new document exactly the way you want from pure code.
OpenXml SDK page
The solution I usually propose to my clients in this situation is to use Sql Server Reporting Services (SSRS). You can use the ReportViewer control included with it in order to generate PDF's, Excel spreadsheets, XML files, CSV files, and others. If you need ad hoc reporting, there is a Report Builder available as well.
Barring that, you can use OpenXml to generate Excel spreadsheets and there are a host of PDF toolkits available.
Have you looked into the reportviewer control, which is part of Visual Studio?
It allows you to export the report in PDF or Excel format.
http://www.carlosag.net/tools/excelxmlwriter/sample
check this might be useful for you
There are lots of reporting solutions out there such as SQL Server Reporting Services(for which you might already have a license). Take a look at Reporting (free || open source) Alternatives to Crystal Reports in Winforms which can likely be applied to the web with a bit of serialization.
I would suggest thinking about rolling your own depending on the situation. You could use pdfsharp for the pdf export and EPPlus for excel. They are both very easy to use and, I'm pretty sure, available in nuget with a couple of clicks.
If you want to go the Excel route, i'd recommend this article from Stephen Walther entitled ASP.NET MVC Tip #2 - Create a custom Action Result that returns Microsoft Excel Documents. This uses an old trick of writing an HTML document with an Excel mime type. This is different than streaming a native Excel file. And it's fairly easy to change the to rendering a CSV file if you want to strip it down, and make it a more universal file. Just remember to double-quote all the fields if there's a possibility of commas showing up.
If what your doing isn't too complicated you can use CSV files. CSV stands for comma separated values, and it is what it sounds like. You can create simple tables and columns using commas. For example paste the following lines into a text file:
heading1,heading2,heading3
info1,info2,info3
info1,info2,info3
Save the text file as a .csv file and voila - an excel spreadsheet. Obviously it is extremely easy to build these looping object collections. Mind you if you need any complicated text formatting etc then it is not really the best option.
I need to create a script that extracts some data from a complex Excel 2003 file (with multiple sheets and different tables inside a single sheet) and produces different XML files that need to be validated against a given XSD file.
My preferred language is Python;
to create and validate XML files i would go with lxml.
What do you suggest for parsing XLS files?
Is xlrd the right tool to use for complex Excel files?
Or do i need to convert all the sheets in CSV manually, and read files line by line, splitting and getting data?
I accept C#, VB6, VBA suggestions too.
[disclaimer: I'm the author of xlrd]
xlrd is quite suited for this kind of job. Get the latest version from PyPI. Get the flavour from the tutorial found here. XLSX support is in alpha test; e-mail me if you need it. The awkwardness and lossiness of the save-as-CSV approach was one of the things that prompted me to write xlrd.
Xlrd is OK. We use it extensively to import XLS files full of references and formulas with multiple sheets and data presented in custom (not Latin-1) encoding.
I am convinced the most simple solution for this task is using Excel VBA together with MSXML parser. Look here for some links how to use the MSXML parser in VBA for reading XML files; you can adopt this easily for writing XML files, I think.
I cant answer whether xlrd/python is the right tool for the job - as I don't know python well enough.
But there are many ways to access the excel data...in the main you have VBA built directly in to Excel.
Then you have Ado.net See David Hayden's article here which allows you to access the data via any DotNet language...even IronPython
In C# ASP.NET 3.5 web application, I need to export multiple datatables (or a dataset) to an Excel 2007 file with multiple sheets, and then provide the user with 'Open/Save' dialog box, WITHOUT saving the Excel file on the web server.
I have used Excel Interop before. I have been reading that it's not efficient and is not the best approach to achieve this and there are more ways to do it, 2 of them being: 1) Converting data in datatables to an XML string that Excel understands 2) Using OPEN XML SDK 2.0.
It looks like OPEN XML SDK 2.0 is better, please let me know. Are there any other ways to do it? I don't want to use any third-party tools.
If I use OPEN XML SDK, it creates an excel file, right? I don't want to save it on the (Windows 2003) server hard drive (I don't want to use Server.MapPath, these Excel files are dynamically created, and they are not required on the server, once client gets them). I directly want to prompt the user to open/save it. I know how to do it when the 'XML string' approach is used.
Please help.
Thank you.
Is Excel 2007 support absolutely required?
We have used NPOI with great success, and it supports all the features we want (multiple worksheets, formatting, formulas). It is also pretty stable.
The files it produces are in Excel 2003 format though, so they are binary, not OOXML.
This question has been asked before, see here for a better discussion.
You can easily stream the xml response to the user as an XML Excel file.
Any Page:
Open excel Report
Report.aspx:
Response.Clear();
Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-excel";
Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition"
, "attachment;filename=" & _fileName & ".xml");
Response.Write("<?xml version=""1.0""?>");
Response.Write(excelXML);
I too had come across similar requirement to export dataset into excel. I used this open source library. It's based on Open XML standards and doesn't use Office Interop. It met my requirement. But, my requirement was basic. So, check if it fulfills your requirement.
I'm developing printing solution for MS Office 2007. Office automation is not right for me, because it requires Office to be installed. Open XML Document Viewer is solution for converting Word files (.docx) to HTML format by XSLT transform, but it works only for .docx. Can the same technology be used for Excel spreadsheets files?
You could use this article XSL transformation of SpreadsheetML to HTML as a starting point to develop your own transform. You can also look at the open source XSLTs in OpenXML/ODF Translator Add-ins for Office to get some ideas on things you may need to account for in any conversion outside of OOXML. The one thing to keep in mind is that SpreadsheetML is more similiar to PresentationML than it is to WordprocessingML in file structure inside the package (i.e. for every sheet, there is a seperate file).
If your doing this from .NET, I'd do this from LINQ instead of XSLT. I've done transforms from DrawingML into SVG and Linq makes it easy (in terms of similiar functionality to XSLT, staying within .NET, etc.)
If you're looking at Excel 97-03 (xls) or Excel 2007 (xlsx) files then I'd recommend FlexCel. I've used it, is very good and honestly quite cheap compared to it's competition.
Note that it doesn't fully support all formatting present in Excel 2007 yet I don't think. But it does have built in functionality to export to HTML.
You could write a SpreadsheetML parser. The schema is available online from Microsoft.
I wrote one a while back that covered data, structure and basic formatting to throw it throw a library and re-save it as an XLS file. Wasn't too difficult.