Prgrammably making excel spreadsheets (97 - 2003 format)

I was wondering how difficult it would be to make an application like this. Basically, I have some old html files that use tables. I want to put these tables into excel for easier reading and manipulation. I only have t开发者_运维百科ext, I have no numbers of formulas or anything.

Are there any tutorials on how to do this sort of thing?

The application would produce .xls

Thanks

You have three options:

1. Output a CSV file. While not an XLS file, Excel is more than capable of opening such a file, and it's extremely easy to create. You need nothing more than standard C++ to implement this solution. This is by far the easiest and quickest way to output to Excel (or any spreadsheet program, for that matter).

2. Use OLE automation. Microsoft even has a Knowledge Base article that provides an example of how to invoke Excel from your native C++ application and fill in some values. If you absolutely need to output XLS files, this is the easiest way to go. Note that users must have Excel installed on their computers for this to work.

3. Create your own XLS writer. Don't even bother with this option unless you really want to generate XLS files without requiring Excel to be installed on end-user computers. Options 1 and 2 are more than good enough for just about any application.

You don't need to reverse-engineer the XLS format; Microsoft documents the excel file format here. Due to the evolution of Excel over the years, it's not exactly a clean specification.

If you don't mind installing a copy of Excel along with your program, using OLE Automation would be much easier.

The simplest thing to do is simply create a CSV file. If you have column headers, put them in the first row. CSV files can be opened natively in Excel as if they were Excel spreadsheets.

There is a trick here: save .html tables with the .xls extension and Excel can read them (ie Excel can read the output of the DataGrid control).

But, if you want to create 'real' Excel files, then you can either use Excel Interop (which could be messy, requires Excel and the PIA's to be installed on the machine, and needs careful memory management (since its COM)). You could also opt for a 3rd-party library like FlexCel - which will avoid many of the InterOp problems but will not give you 'complete' Excel functionality (addins, custom vba macros etc.). For most uses, however, a 3rd party library should do the trick.

Looks like there's another alternative called ExcelFormat. I didn't try it, though.