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I have a new ASP.NET MVC project that has two requirements that require using the Office Interop DLLs to generate Excel spreadsheet files in Excel 2003 format by combining several template files into a multi-sheet workbook and to parse these files once filled in. The files we parse may come back in Excel 2003, 2007 or 2010 format (I believe 2007 and 2010 file formats are identical but feel free to correct me on that).

I'd be much happier if we could convince the (internal) clients to drop this requirement. They have been made aware of the risks in this type of work and still want to go ahead so now I'm looking for good references to help get us started and have had some trouble narrowing down the correct keywords to search for.

Thanks.

lukeck
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    Using Interop dlls on the server side is really a bad idea... I have tried once, and it did not work.... Try Aspose Cells, I have used Aspose Word and I was very satisfied. It is not free, but it worked great for me.... (No, I have no connection to Aspose, I have just used it and liked it....) – apolka Jul 29 '10 at 07:20
  • Have you read this http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257757 – Ahmad Jul 29 '10 at 08:07
  • Yeah you guys are right. I had my concerns about taking the approach I described above and soon after posting this question I found the document Ahmad linked to. We've been told there's no budget for purchasing additional tools like Aspose so are going to try using the open source libraries ExcelLibrary for Excel 2003 support and ExcelPackage for 2007 support. – lukeck Jul 30 '10 at 03:54

1 Answers1

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Using Excel interop on the server is a reallyy bad idea. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257757

Alternatives are:

Open source

Excel 2003

Excel 2007

Commercial

Nate Anderson
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lukeck
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