Hi all!

I've been playing around with generating excel spreedsheets on the fly from ASP. It's surprisngly simple and easy, although the results (html based files) aren't exactly perfect.

What I really wanted to do was create proper excel files, and be able to name the worksheets. This is important if your going to attempt to import data from the worksheets later, using ASP.

I tried a couple of components that were either free, or quite cheap. Neither was any real use. I also discovered I could actually create the spreadsheets through by referencing owc.dll, office web components (which happens to be installed on my development server). Again, not really the way to go from a licencing position.

I then came acorss OfficeWriter from SoftArtisans. Now it's brilliant!! It will let me create native excel and ms word files, including formatting, charts, graphs, formulas, pivot tables, etc.. basically eveything you can do in excel - but without excel, and all from ASP.

I bought a development licence and have used it with great effect and ease.

However, the production licence version is not cheap, to say the least.

Does anyone know of any other competing products that are more affordable, but just as good - or close?

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www.bsolveit.com
Web Design & SEO for Business Growth

Is Excel installed on the Host machine? I'm thinking that it's not, but if it is, you can instantiate an Excel Application object in your ASP code. If it isn't, you'll have to either know the exact format of Excel files, or use a component.

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jedicoder
current seo efforts on Website Designer Search Directory and Grand Oak eCommerce Web Designer

Yes, I'm aware of that option, but we don't want to install office (or even just excel) on the server - apart from anything else that creates licensing issues.

I've looked everywhere and so far the only option I can find is the one from SoftArtisans, but it's so expensive. ($7,500)

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www.bsolveit.com
Web Design & SEO for Business Growth

Well of course you could always create .csv files which can be opened in Excel (but must just be in a table format with columns of data) or here's an interesting article:

Creating a Dynamic Report using ASP and Excel by Jeff Anderson - 1/9/2003
http://www.codetoad.com/asp_excel.asp
Uses Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-excel"

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J. Paul Schmidt
www.Bullschmidt.com - Freelance Web and Database Developer
www.Bullschmidt.com/DevTip.asp - Classic ASP Design Tips