I have created an Excel document-level customization in Visual Studio 2017 using Windows 7. The document provides a set of tools for charting and analyzing data that are contained in several worksheets within the document.
I would like to provide the end user multiple versions of this document without publishing each one separately. Each version differs only in the data that will be contained. All the code, classes, subs, and functions would be identical for each version. I was hoping they could
rely on the same assembly.
I tested this by publishing a document (named DocumentA) on a test PC (Windows10) and then copying an additional file (named DocumentB). Trying to open DocumentB in Excel produces the following error:
Could not load assembly "DocumentA", Version 1.0.0.0. Culture =Neutral or one of its dependencies. The System could not find the file specified.
I think I understand why this happens. However, if I save the original published document DocumentA as DocumentB1, I can open the renamed file
with no problem. Not sure why this works and the other case does not. The property settings for assembly name and location were identical for DocumentA and DocumentB.
Is there any type of work-around? Or must I publish each of these additional documents separately?
Thanks!
I would like to provide the end user multiple versions of this document without publishing each one separately.
You need to create separate document level add-ins then. Or you may consider developing a single application-level add-in instead. See Walkthrough: Create your first VSTO Add-in for Excel for more information.
I would like to generate multiple pdfs at once. Those pdfs should pull data from a database. It can be an excel table or a relational database, doesn't matter, I can create whatever.
Using excel and javascript in adobe acrobat pro I managed to pull data into a template pdf, but for every record (row) I have in excel table I have to manually generate one pdf, then another, and so on.. and there are a lot of records, so I would like to do that automatically if possible.
Is there a way to do that? Any suggestions?
I added an image to better explain it...
Look into the Acrobat SDK, Section: "Interapplication Communication" to learn how you can control Acrobat via VB/VBA and how you can work with the JavaScript Object (JSO).
Then have a look into the "Acrobat JavaScript Scripting reference" and look at
the Doc Object with commands like .. addField and at
the Field object to set the properties of the fields.
That should do what you want, Reinhard
PS: With Open Office you can save spreadsheets as PDF and with newer version of Excel too. Wouldn't that be already enough or perhaps a mix of above and this.
Full disclosure: I founded and run Epsillion Software.
mirta, one option is Epsillion Publisher. We built it for your exact use case.
You would need to specify what your template should look like. The Epsillion team will design it for you.
You then specify what your variables are in a Word document (e.g., name, last name, date of birth). The software will process the Word and Excel files and return PDFs for you.
Templates are flexible and flow as needed.
Hope that helps. Good luck!
Does anyone know of resources that can help me export simple contents of a GridView to a native Excel 2007 format (i.e. the OpenOfficeXML format).
I've already seen solutions like Matt Berseth's, and in fact I have been using that for a while, but it comes with an annoying warning produced by Excel 2007 as documented here stemming from the fact that a native Excel file is not generated; rather it is HTML.
My initial research shows that, at the core, xlsx files are zip files, but I have no idea how to produce these or what goes in them.
Any suggestions (or tutorials) would be greatly appreciated.
CarlosAg has an ExcelXML writer which works really well. It isn't a native excel 2007 formatted file, but it will be readable in excel 2007.
You will need to write a little method to do the exporting manually, the API is very straight forward though. You will create a sheet object, then a row object, then a cell object. You can just loop through your data and output it. The examples on the site are pretty decent.
I prefer using Microsoft's own Open XML Format SDK. It is free, it is released by Microsoft and it creates real .xlsx files.
You can find the reference documentation here, as you can see, it is pretty straightforward to use.
SpreadsheetGear for .NET can read and write native xls and xlsx files and is easier to use (takes less of your time) than other solutions because it has an Excel like API so you don't have to learn anything about Open XML.
You can see some live ASP.NET (C# and VB) Excel Reporting examples here and download an evaluation version here.
Disclaimer: I own SpreadsheetGear LLC
Our product has the requirement of exporting its native format (essentially an XML file) to Excel for viewing/editing. However, what this entails is having a dependency on Excel (or Office) itself for our product build - something that we do not want.
What we have done is export the data from our native format to a csv file which can be opened in Excel. If user selects an option to open the generated report as well, we (try to) launch Excel application to open it (ofcourse it requires Excel to be already present on the client system).
The data for most part is flat list of records.
Is there a better format (or even a better way) to handle this requirement? This is a common requirement for many products - how do you handle this?
Excel versions, both 2007 and several previous, have native XML formats. 2007, obviously, is XML by default, and earlier versions have the ability to save as XML. This SO question deals with the issue. I'd guess a little inspection would give an idea of what's required. I don't know if a XSD/DTD exists for older versions, but a little creative Googling might yield something.
As other people pointed out, it is reasonably easy to generate Excel XML files. You can do this in multiple ways. For example:
By creating a template Excel XML document, and then using XML DOM to stuff your data into the template, or
Converting the template Excel XML into an XSLT, and then simply passing your proprietary XML as input to XSLT.
I'm using ExcelPackage to create spreadsheets in one of my side projects. Works pretty good, but (at least the version I'm using) its a bit limited when it comes to styling and calculations.
ExcelPackage lets you create OOXML docs (.xslx files) that are natively compat with 2k7, but you can download a plugin for previous versions of Office from MS.
We export our data either using Excel objects (COM based code) on client side or CSV file (usually on server side, but can be used on client side too). And we allow copy data from grids in simple html format, what can be pasted into Excel without problems.
For one customer we even had to export data [from sql stored procedure] into csv-like tab-separated format, but named file like xxxxx.xls - this way excel opened that file in more correct way than csv file. Ugly hack, but worked well.
CSV is most compatible format (no dependencies on external applications or libraries), but customers don't like it. Maybe we need to incorporate some XLS export code, this way all users will be happy :)
If .csv isn't formatted enough, you could create a template in Excel, and use a little bit of VBA code to import the CSV and format it appropriately. This way your app is only concerned with generating the .CSV, and will use the same .XLS for each export.
If you're careful, you should be able to get this to work with most versions of Excel seamlessly.
With Perl there are several modules that can be used to produce .xlsx files without requiring an Office installation. Among those :
https://metacpan.org/pod/Excel::Writer::XLSX is the most well-known, with support for many Excel features like colors, formatting, etc.
https://metacpan.org/pod/Excel::ValueWriter::XLSX (I'm actually the author) has less features but is optimized for fast writing of large amounts of data
If you are working in Java, Checkout the POI project from APACHE.
http://poi.apache.org/
Simple, nice, complete, powerful.
We started with Office on the server, but that's not very nice. We had to kill processes that hung, and had quite a bit of a performance dip. We thought about putting it on a different machine, but didn't bother after trying and using Aspose (commercial). We don't have a very large number of simultaneous users, but complex documents. Simple ones can be handled easier with csv.
I've used FlexCel Studio for a couple of projects now. It's very functional and fast. 100% managed code, no dependencies. Sounds like you'd use the "Reports" feature which allows you to define an empty report template in Excel, then pass datatable and volia, it's populated with your data.
TMS Software
We use a combination of OleDB and Interop. We found that Interop was much faster and used less memory, but it's a pain for compatibility issues, especially when using different language installs of Office.
OleDb has the advantage that you don't require Excel to be installed on the client machine. Both Interop and OleDb support multiple sheets (tables) per workbook which you cannot do with csv.
If you're using C# or VB.Net, and your data is in a a DataSet, DataTable or List<>, then you can use my free "Export to Excel" class.
It uses the free Microsoft OpenXML libraries (so you don't need to have Excel on your server), and lets you export your data into a "real" .xlsx file with just one line of code, eg:
DataSet ds = CreateSampleData();
CreateExcelFile.CreateExcelDocument(ds, "C:\\Sample.xlsx");
All source code is provided on the following page along with a demo project, completely free of charge (and popups !)
http://mikesknowledgebase.com/pages/CSharp/ExportToExcel.htm
Hope this helps !
I am stuck with a problem
The Requirement is that, there a complex Excel file(XLS) that is used as template; it has Macros and all the worksheets are either locked or hidden. When the user clicks to download it, the follows operation occurs
Unlock a particular worksheet, fill some data # certain cells and then lock it back.
Unhide a worksheet, fill some data # certain cells and then hide it back.
I think there are two options to resolve it (if there are more then please let me know)
Interop libraries / Excel Object Library
OLEDb Driver
I cannot got with the option 1 as excel is not installed on the webserver and I heard that it's not a good option to install MSOffice # webserver.
My question is that can we use OLDb to perform the operations mentioned above OR is there any other option ???
BTW Sharepoint service is also not available :(
Please help!!!!
You could maybe try ExcelPackge.
See this article:
Server-Side Creation of Excel 2007 Files Using .NET 3.0 and Office Open XML
see also:
Office Space - Building Office Open XML Files
Check out this question I asked some time ago for an overview of options. I ended up going with the Aspose library, which I link to in my original post. It's not cheap, but it does the job very simply and elegantly. It even has templating functionality built in (called SmartMarkers, IIRC).
SpreadsheetGear for .NET will handle this and has an API which is very similar to Excel. You can see what our customers say and download the free, fully functional evalution here.