André Krijnen

If you want to export data with VB.NET of C# you can do it with the Office API’s delivered with your Office API’s, but I wasn’t to happy with the Excel Object. After doing some research on the internet I discovered alot of ways to write your own manner to Generate an Excel document with the XmlSpreadsheet. Well after doing some tryouts with Excel I discovered that Excel has alot of options how to save your data.

• Excel Workbook (*.xlsx) Office 2007 Format
• Excel Macro-Enabled Workbook (*.xlsm) Office 2007 Format
• Excel Binary Workbook (*.xlsb) Office 2007 Format
• Excel 97-2003 Workbook (*.xls)
• XML Data (*.xml)
• Single File Web Page (*.mht; *.mhtml)
• Web Page (*.htm; *.html)
• Excel Template (*.xltx) Office 2007 Format
• Excel Macro-Enabled Template (*.xltm) Office 2007 Format
• Excel 97-2003 Template (*.xlt)
• Text (Tab Delimited) (*.txt)
• Unicode Text (*.txt)
• XML Spreadsheet (*.xml)
• Microsoft Excel 5.0/95 Workbook (*.xls)
• CSV (Comma Delimited) (*.csv)
• Formatted Text (Space Delimited) (*.prn)
• Text (Macintosh) (*.txt)
• Text (MS-DOS) (*.txt)
• CSV (Macintosh) (*.csv)
• CSV (MS-DOS) (*.csv)
• DIF (Data Interchange Format) (*.dif)
• SYLK (Symbolic Link) (*.slk)
• Excel Add-In (*.xlam) Office 2007 Format
• Excel 97-2003 Add-In (*.xla)

You’ll see that the XML Spreadsheet normally would be saved in the Extension of *.xml, however you can save this also as *.xls. Why is that? You would ask? Well Excel has alot of manners how to open or save data. If you would have a CSV file delimited in Comma’s or Tab delimited files you can also open this with Excel. And you can see that the data is perfectly rendered in the Spreadsheet.

Let’s see where a XML SpreadSheet starts with:

After this section you will include you styles. When writing your styles you can build a Excel Workbook manually and make some different styles init. After that you can save this Workbook to a XML Spreadsheet. When you finally saved a Workbook it will generate for example the following styles:

What you can do is giving alot of extra options to your excel sheet. Every above style has a particular function. You can specify a column and give it a specific style. So that the column will be formatted by for example Scientific functions. After the styles there will be the data for your spreadsheet.

First we start with a new Worksheet. Every worksheet has a name . Let’s start with that:

When we have done that we can add our table with data in our Worksheet. It will look like this.