Hello World with ExcelApplication

ExcelWriter's ExcelApplication approach provides you with full programmatic control over the Excel file formats (XLS, XLSX, XLSM). This includes the ability to create and modify: charts, formulas, formatting, data validation, conditional formatting, worksheet protection, images and more! This tutorial will show you how to create a new workbook and write a value to a cell.

Diving right into the code

1. Include the SoftArtisans.OfficeWriter.ExcelWriter namespace in the code behind.

2. Instantiate the ExcelApplication object

Unlike the ExcelTemplate object, which represents a single file, the ExcelApplication works as a file generation engine. The ExcelApplication object can be used to create, open, and save multiple workbooks.

3. Create a new workbook with [ExcelApplication.Create()]

ExcelWriter has the ability to create Excel 2003 (XLS) files and Excel 2007 (XLSX) files, but cannot convert between formats. The file format must be declared when the workbook is created and the file extension of the output file must match when the file is saved.

ExcelApplication.Create() automatically creates the first worksheet in the workbook for you.

4. Access the first worksheet through the Workbook.Worksheets collection

You can access worksheets by name (e.g. "Sheet1") or by index (shown above), but ExcelWriter will throw an exception if you attempt to access a worksheet that does not exist.

5. Write the value from the web form into a cell

It is important to note that ExcelWriter indices are all 0-indexed, unlike Excel indices, which are 1-indexed. This is importing when working with cells, rows, columns, and worksheet positions in ExcelWriter. You can also reference cells by name; in this case, it would be "A1".

6. Save the workbook

ExcelApplication.Save has the same output options as ExcelTemplate: save to disk, save to memory stream, stream back to the client inline, and stream back to the client as an attachment. In this case, we're streaming the workbook back to the client as an attachment.
Remember that the file extension must match the file format specified when the workbook was created.

7. Run the code. In the output file, you will see that the custom text from the form has been inserted into cell "A1".

Final Code

Downloads

You can download the code for the Hello World tutorial as a Visual Studio solution.

• [Hello World Tutorial^ExcelWriter_HelloWorldC#.zip]
• [Hello World Tutorial^ExcelWriter_HelloWorldVB.zip]