Urgent Help Reqired!!!
I am working on an ASP.NET Webforms application that reads MS Excel spreadsheets and loads the data into SQL Server. The application works fine on Win Server 2003 (Which has MS Office installed).
During our migration of the software onto a Win Server 2008 (Which does not have MS Office installed) the application fails with a COM error message, “Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {00024500-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} failed due to the following error: 80040154”.
This I assume is because even though we have the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.dll within the applications sub directories the application cannot find the Excel application.
Now, here is the problem. Our infrastructure team refuses to install MS Office or Excel onto the server. They are adamant in their claim that there are work-arounds out there that will allow the application to work with Excel without the installation of ms office or excel.
Personally, I have never come accross any such solutions and from articles that I have read seem to confirm this???
Does anybody know if there is any way to get an ASP.NET application working with MS Excel, when MS OFfice or Excel is not installed?
MS do not support the interop of office for ASP.Net http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257757 since it may exhibit unstable behaviour.
There are quite a few libraries out there to allow you to work with Excel documents without installing Excel, for example: NPOI, MS Open XML SDK and EPPlus