You have a few options. 1. First and foremost, Reporting Services can create reports with tons of complexity. Of course, Reporting Services has its own model and requirements. It also has a lot of power -- worth the investment of your time.
2. You can bind and then custom populate a GridView, and render it as Excel-importable XML. Doing this with a simple Response operation works, but it often seems like Excel doesn't like these exports if they're over 5MB or so -- Excel is slow to open, might crash, difficult to scroll, etc. etc. 3. I recently started using DataSets, DataTables and this rendering mechanism: http://www26.brinkster.com/mvark/codegallery/Export_to_excel_with_number_formatting.aspx You can populate the bulk of the dataset with databinding, then add custom columns and custom rows to support your additional reporting needs. 4. SpreadsheetML is still an option too I think, but with OpenXML in 2007, I'm not sure what SpreadsheetML offers you over #3. Might be something to look at just to get a feel for things however. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb226693(office.11).aspx ∞ Andy Badera ∞ +1 518-641-1280 ∞ This email is: [ ] bloggable [x] ask first [ ] private ∞ Google me: http://www.google.com/search?q=andrew%20badera On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 10:24 AM, David L. Crooks <[email protected]> wrote: > > This might not be exactly the best place for this question, but I am > using a C#/Windows form to prompt the user and get parameters for > retrieving data. I am also storing the data in SQL Server 2008 and > using SSIS to import an Excel Spreadsheet. Then some queries need to > be executed and produce some advanced spreadsheets with multiple > sheets. Initially, I was thinking of Reporting Services, but I don't > think it can create such complex spreadsheets. Has anyone used any > 3rd party tools to create Excel Spreadsheets? Thanks! > > David L. Crooks >
