Excel – Page 3 – Justin Cooney

.Net, ASP.NET, Excel, Excel 2003, Excel 2007, Excel 2010, IIS, IIS6, MS Office, Outlook, Security, Web Development, Web Server, WebForms

Configuring a Web Server to Allow Excel File Creation via the Interop.Excel Namespace

2012-09-202012-09-20 Justin Cooney

In an earlier article I covered how to generate Excel reports on the fly using the Interop.Excel Namespace.

This is a really handy technique that also gives you full control over the minutia of the document you are creating. However the catch in using this technique is that you will need to update the configuration of your Web server to allow Web users to trigger Excel on your Web server. This can mean some pretty drastic security changes and possible loopholes in your Web server’s security so you should do a risk analysis before choosing this method.

In this article I will review the Web server security updates that need to be made to allow using the Interop.Excel Namespace to generate Excel documents for your Web site.

Please note that since I am developing this site for an Intranet, I am not as concerned with locking down the server. If you are working with a server that is exposed to the Web then you will want to review these security changes much more thoroughly.

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.Net, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, Excel, Excel 2003, Excel 2007, Excel 2010, MS Office, Programming, VB.NET, WebForms

ASP.NET – Generating an Excel Report on the Fly Using the Interop.Excel Namespace

2012-09-022013-11-19 Justin Cooney

As a developer, a commonly requested feature is the ability to export data from the Web into MS Excel.

Choosing the best way to export your data from an ASP.NET Web page to Excel for your users is never an easy task. There are several ways to generate your reports, with each way having its pros and cons. For starters you’ll have to take into consideration if you are developing a Web based application that needs to enforce strong security, or a more permissive Web-based application that will allow you to write temporary files to your server’s hard drive.

In an earlier article I covered one of the more common ways: how to take an existing report that has already been generated as an HTML table and stream it as Excel to the client browser. This is a great technique, but leaves it up to Excel to interpret the HTML that you are sending its way. Furthermore, Microsoft seems to be deprecating the markup that was previously so amazingly convenient when formatting HTML streamed to Excel. The article also goes into depth about what markup commands are still useful and what markup has been deprecated. It’s definitely worth reading this article if you are considering streaming HTML as an Excel document using the command: Response.ContentType = “application/ms-excel”

Before I go into further details on using the Interop.Excel namespace to generate Excel files, I’d like to point out that I am providing a fully functional example at the end of this article. If you are primarily interested in the code, then you can skip to the bottom of this article and you can copy and paste the code sample into a Visual Studio project where it should run without any problems.

Continue reading “ASP.NET – Generating an Excel Report on the Fly Using the Interop.Excel Namespace” →

Excel, Excel 2007, MS Office, Outlook, SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, SQL Tips, Transact-SQL, tSQL

SQL OpenRowSet Excel Query Returns Null Values

2012-02-20 Justin Cooney

In an earlier article I reviewed how to query an Excel spreadsheet from SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). I’ve found that this functionality is very useful, especially when working with data maintained by business users outside of a database system.

For an overview of how to connect SSMS with an Excel WorkSheet, please see my detailed article covering the subject. I continue to use the method of saving my SpreadSheet as a .xls format file which I then connect to using the OpenRowSet command with the Microsoft Jet OLEDB 4.0 driver. Once the Excel worksheet is query-able by SSMS it’s quite simple to work with this data just like you would work with a regular table.

However, one important caveat is that if your worksheet contains numeric as well as alphabetic data, this will confuse the driver and depending on the order of the data in your Spreadsheet, null results will be returned instead of the numeric data.

This behavior can be surprising when one first notices it, but happily it can be easily corrected so that you can properly query mixed data type columns.

Category: Excel