Users love their spreadsheets. And they want to use them as input into systems, but these spreadsheets get passed around in email and multiple copies of them are made and spread across server shares…But there is no centralized control over the format, layout of these spreadsheets and we are lacking version control.
I once played around with Farpoint’s Spread ASP.NET Excel control that mimicked Excel’s functionality on the web. You felt like you were running Excel locally, but it was a server component that didn’t use Excel.
I am not sure where I am going with this exactly, but I suspect that giving the users server based Excel functionality can lead to a happy user base and more control over the data.
I was wondering if someone can suggest the best server side control for mimicing Excel functionality. I noticed that Farpoint’s Excel control wasn’t available .NET 4 and I looked at this as a possible bad sign.
Any thought?
NPOI is a good library that I’ve used with success to deliver streamed Excel content to browser clients from ASP.net. As an added bonus it’s open source and free. It’s a port of the Java POI library that does the same. The only downside I’ve found is the support only for formats through 2003, but then again, what’s changed much since then in XLS?