Skip to main content

Programmatically creating an Excel file without using OpenXML(or Excel Interop)

With the switch to the Excel XLSX format, it became possible to create Excel files using the new XML based OpenXML format. Great news for us developers as we no longer needed Excel Interop or 3th party components to generate our XML files programmatically.

However, the world ain’t perfect yet, as the OpenXML format is very rich and complex. So it’s still not easy to generate an XML file without any help or tooling. Luckily for us there is the OpenXML SDK which helps a lot when creating these Excel files.

But did you know there is a simpler alternative which doesn’t even require the OpenXML SDK? Using a simple XML is enough. Let’s have a look…

  • First create a new MVC application
  • Inside the App_Data folder add the following XML template:
  • Let’s now create an action method that reads the XML template, replaces the placeholder token with some data and send the results to the browser:
  • Run the application and browse to the /home/downloadexcel url
  • A download dialog will be shown and once you open the file in Excel you’ll see something like:

image

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

Kubernetes–Limit your environmental impact

Reducing the carbon footprint and CO2 emission of our (cloud) workloads, is a responsibility of all of us. If you are running a Kubernetes cluster, have a look at Kube-Green . kube-green is a simple Kubernetes operator that automatically shuts down (some of) your pods when you don't need them. A single pod produces about 11 Kg CO2eq per year( here the calculation). Reason enough to give it a try! Installing kube-green in your cluster The easiest way to install the operator in your cluster is through kubectl. We first need to install a cert-manager: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.5/cert-manager.yaml Remark: Wait a minute before you continue as it can take some time before the cert-manager is up & running inside your cluster. Now we can install the kube-green operator: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kube-green/kube-green/releases/latest/download/kube-green.yaml Now in the namespace where we want t...
Read more

DevToys–A swiss army knife for developers

As a developer there are a lot of small tasks you need to do as part of your coding, debugging and testing activities.  DevToys is an offline windows app that tries to help you with these tasks. Instead of using different websites you get a fully offline experience offering help for a large list of tasks. Many tools are available. Here is the current list: Converters JSON <> YAML Timestamp Number Base Cron Parser Encoders / Decoders HTML URL Base64 Text & Image GZip JWT Decoder Formatters JSON SQL XML Generators Hash (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512) UUID 1 and 4 Lorem Ipsum Checksum Text Escape / Unescape Inspector & Case Converter Regex Tester Text Comparer XML Validator Markdown Preview Graphic Col...
Read more