Export WebGrid data to Excel in MVC4 - excel

Question

I want to export WebGrid data to excel with formatting.
I have written below code which export WebGrid data to Excel.
WebGrid grid = new WebGrid(source: listReport, canPage: false, canSort: false);
string gridData = grid.GetHtml(
columns: grid.Columns(
grid.Column("ID", "ID"),
grid.Column("Name", "Name"),
grid.Column("Summary", "Summary"),
grid.Column("Detail", "Detail"),
grid.Column("ProjectName", "Project Name")
)
).ToString();
Response.ClearContent();
Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment; filename=CustomerInfo.xls");
Response.ContentType = "application/excel";
Response.Write(gridData);
Response.End();
I want to do formatting in excel.
Is it possible to export data with formatting?
Also it gives me below error when i open the generated excel

Answer 1

You haven't actually created an Excel file. You've created an HTML file masquerading as an Excel 2003 file, which is a bad idea. I explain why and cover some alternatives on my blog.
Styling will be difficult, because of the way you're creating the source HTML. You could parse it with a library, then add basic styling via each elements style attribute. Or instead of using WebGrid you can manually build your HTML.
string html = "<table style='color:red'><tr><td>Hello, world!</td></tr></table>";
But really, the best thing to do is generate real Excel files. Here's a quick excerpt from my blog using EPPlus. It's shown in Web Forms. In MVC you'd actually want to return a FileResult rather than writing directly to the response.
protected void ExportBtn_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Response.Clear();
Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment;filename=myexcelfile.xlsx");
Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet";
var package = new ExcelPackage(); //create a new package, this is the equivalent of an XLSX file.
var sheet = package.Workbook.Worksheets.Add("My Data"); //Add a new sheet to the workbook
var dt = GetDataTable(); //This retrieves a System.Data.DataTable, you'd likely get it from your database.
sheet.Cells["A1"].LoadFromDataTable(dt, true); //EPPlus contains helper function to load data from a DataTable, though you could manually fill in rows/column values yourself if you want
var range = sheet.Cells[1, 1, dt.Rows.Count + 1, 2]; //We're getting a reference to all the cells that contain data
var table = sheet.Tables.Add(range, "My Data Table"); //Creating an Excel table
table.TableStyle = TableStyles.Medium8; //Setting the table style to something that looks nice
range.AutoFitColumns(); //Auto fitting the column widths.
Response.BinaryWrite(package.GetAsByteArray());
Response.End();
}