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Ask YC: Excel Generation (Server Side)?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask YC: Excel Generation (Server Side)?

#11

Post by jharrison »

When I was at Bank of America I worked on an internal Project Management tool that used a ton of Excel spreadsheets. If you can start with some kind of template it becomes dead simple. Excel spreadsheets can be used as datasources without Excel being installed on the server (iirc). Our app just connected to the XLS and dumped the data into the existing columns. If you have charts based on those columns then you're good to go.

Of course if you can't start with a template or need to add columns on the fly...it might be a little more challenging.

Re: Ask YC: Excel Generation (Server Side)?

#13

Post by bradgessler »

erictobia wrote: post #6
mrtron wrote: post #2

I know of a lib for Python but it only produces xls. http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyexcelerator If you are using ASP.NET why can't you install Office on the server?

The latest (licensed) version of Office we have is 2003. As far as we know using Office 2003 for server side Excel generation is not recommended. Thanks for the link to the Python framework though.

Its not recommended but it does work! We managed to get MS Office to kick out around 10-15 documents per second on a single IIS server running ASP.net without much optimization. If you wanted to go crazy you could just load-balance the servers and kick out way more docs.

We tried to use a Java lib for Office docs but it was a pain in the neck. We had some very specific requirements for embedding an ActiveX control into a document and the OSS libs just weren't going to cut it. If your volume requirements aren't too high, I would just start with interoping with MS Office.

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