Question

On this project I am working on right now, one of the newest feature requests is to output expense information which is stored into expense report that matches an Excel worksheet they already use for all of their expense reporting.

I was curious if there was a way that I could take this excel worksheet (with all of its layout already done) and just fill in the parts that our system tracks and then serve it up as an .xls file to the user without having to do Excel Automation or any other method that requires Excel to be installed on the server.

Note: development environment is ASP.NET 2.0

Answer 1

I am pretty sure you can can use OleDB to open the excel file(with the template)

Example 1

string ConnectionString=@'Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;                     Data Source=C:\Test Projects\Excel example\Excel - reading an excel file\ReadThis.xls;                     Extended Properties=Excel 5.0';  //Create the connection  System.Data.OleDb.OleDbConnection ExcelConnection = new System.Data.OleDb.OleDbConnection(ConnectionString); 

Link to article 1

Example 2

string filename = @'C:\testdata.xls';  string connectionString = 'Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;' +  'Data Source=' + filename + ';' +  'Extended Properties=Excel 8.0;';  OleDbConnection objConn = new OleDbConnection(connectionString);  objConn.Open();  OleDbCommand ObjCommand = new OleDbCommand('SELECT * FROM [Sheet1$]', objConn);  OleDbDataAdapter objAdp = new OleDbDataAdapter();  objAdp.SelectCommand = ObjCommand;  DataSet myDataSet = new DataSet();  objAdp.Fill(myDataSet);  DataTable dataTable = myDataSet.Tables['Sheet1$']; 

Link to Article 2

Once you have opened the connection you should be able to read and write to it however you like!