Generating Excel from a application 1

[AndyH1]

ive been asked to produce an Application which reads from a database on the network and generates Excel from the data. It has to cover users still using Excel 2003. In the past Ive created websites which have a copy of Excel on the server and generated by this method, but am unsure of the process on an application. Do I somehow use the clients Excel to generate the spreadsheet? and if so could someone advise me how to do this or point me to coding.

The clients are going to be using a mixture of versions of Excel from 2003 to 2010.

Is this feasible?

Any help would be gratefully recieved

Andy

 

[jmeckley]

what you describe sounds like ETL (extract, transform, load). I use Rhino.ETL for all my ETL operations.

Does the file itself need to be excel, or does the user simply need to view the results in Excel?

If they need to open the results to so they can preform manual extrapolations on the data (pivot, charts, etc.) then dumping the data to a CSV file is much easier. Excel opens CSV files without any fuss.

if on the other hand you need the excel work book to be pre-populated with formulas, charts and pivot tables, then you will need to dump the data to an excel format. And there you will need to account for which version of Excel the user has.

thread732-1609580 is another post where I mention rhino.etl.

Jason Meckley
Programmer
Specialty Bakers, Inc.

faq855-7190
faq732-7259