I have built a template engine for Excel at work. It has For...Each loops for populating columns and rows with the contents of passed template variables. A sheet can grow... like a couple of rectangles continents pushing each other to get enough space - leaving holes sometimes.
I have a source document (template) and a target document (output file). I am using EPPlus for copying cells from template to output file. This generic Excel engine is much slower than the handwritten Interop code (factor 2!!!).
A profiler showed me that the big time consumer is the Range.Copy(destinationRange) method. Soooo... actually I only want the destination cells to look the same as the source cells.
Is there a faster way?
Unzipping the Excel file, I see there is only one style file. The output file could start with the styles of the template file. But how can this be done? And how do I address style information?
(I will spent a look at the EPPlus source...)
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I am using C# with EPPlus library.
The task is that I am opening an excel file, removing some sheets from it and saving it as a separate excel file.
The issue I am facing is that the excel sheet tabs at the bottom are moved out of view in the output file saved:
The activesheet is sheet 1, but the Sheet 1 tab is not visible on the excel file.
Is there any command using EPPlus which can amend this to look like:
Files saved by Excel can contain information about the width of the tab area. I am quite sure that EPPlus does not take care of this detail.
If you rename a .xlsx file to .zip and take the xl\workbook.xml file of it you will find a section that may contain an attribute 'tabRatio'. The attribute is present only if the width is adjusted manually. This attribute or the whole section may be deleted.
I did a test: I saved a file with too little space for the tabs and after deletion of the section the tab area looked fine again.
Maybe EPPlus generates the 'tabRatio' attribute but with useless values? Please check for it. If so, you might want to file a request for the developers to leave it out if it does not make sense.
I have been looking for a solution all over the last days and I found that this library EPPlus allows retrieving in the same time formatting besides the actual data, plus charts, if needed, from Excel files which is what I am aiming at the moment.
Could you please explain to me step by step how to read a Range of cells from an Excel (like A1:P34) file that resides at a certain path, via ASP.NET/C#?
PATH would be something like //ServerName/Folder1/Folder2/Folder3/ExcelFileName.xlsx
I looked over the web, but there is not explicit documentation for my level of C# expertise on this. I tried several examples but none displayed the Excel Range into the webpage. (e.g this one.)
Note: the three examples I have tried all included an File Upload Control, I do not need such. I want to read the Excel file from a specified location over the local network.
EPPlus library is available here.
If you can recommend me any simpler resources to understand EPPlus on:
-reading from Excel
-writing from Excel
-reading charts from Excel
This EPPlus does seem wonderful in its functionality.
To read a file off the server take a look at this:
Open ExcelPackage Object with Excel application without saving it on local file path
Just need to set the var path part for your file.
To actually put the excel data on a web page, that is not so easy. See this:
Generating a HTML table from an Excel file using EPPlus?
Response to Comment:
Hosting an actual excel sheet in web page is temperamental at best but there are ways to do it (I haven't tried it personally). SharePoint is probably your best option if you have it available. If not, you would have to use an iFrame or some kind of office web component. Check this out:
how to display excel sheet in html page
I am calling a web service and the data from the web service is in csv format.
If I try to save data in xls/xlsx, then I get multiple sheets in a workbook.
So, how can I save the data in csv with multipletab/sheets in c#.
I know csv with multiple tabs is not practical, but is there any damn way or any library to save data in csv with multiple tabs/sheet?
CSV, as a file format, assumes one "table" of data; in Excel terms that's one sheet of a workbook. While it's just plain text, and you can interpret it any way you want, the "standard" CSV format does not support what your supervisor is thinking.
You can fudge what you want a couple of ways:
Use a different file for each sheet, with related but distinct names, like "Book1_Sheet1", "Book1_Sheet2" etc. You can then find groups of related files by the text before the first underscore. This is the easiest to implement, but requires users to schlep around multiple files per logical "workbook", and if one gets lost in the shuffle you've lost that data.
Do the above, and also "zip" the files into a single archive you can move around. You keep the pure CSV advantage of the above option, plus the convenience of having one file to move instead of several, but the downside of having to zip/unzip the archive to get to the actual files. To ease the pain, if you're in .NET 4.5 you have access to a built-in ZipFile implementation, and if you are not you can use the open-source DotNetZip or SharpZipLib, any of which will allow you to programmatically create and consume standard Windows ZIP files. You can also use the nearly universal .tar.gz (aka .tgz) combination, but your users will need either your program or a third-party compression tool like 7Zip or WinRAR to create the archive from a set of exported CSVs.
Implement a quasi-CSV format where a blank line (containing only a newline) acts as a "tab separator", and your parser would expect a new line of column headers followed by data rows in the new configuration. This variant of standard CSV may not readable by other consumers of CSVs as it doesn't adhere to the expected file format, and as such I would recommend you don't use the ".csv" extension as it will confuse and frustrate users expecting to be able to open it in other applications like spreadsheets.
If I try to save data in xls/xlsx, then I get multiple sheets in a workbook.
Your answer is in your question, don't use text/csv (which most certainly can not do multiple sheets, it can't even do one sheet; there's no such thing as a sheet in text/csv though there is in how some applications like Excel or Calc choose to import it into a format that does have sheets) but save it as xls, xlsx, ods or another format that does have sheets.
Both XLSX and ODS are much more complicated than text/csv, but are each probably the most straightforward of their respective sets of formats.
I've been using this library for a while now,
https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx
in my projects to import data and structure from formats like: xls(x), csv and xml but you can for sure save in that formats as well (all from client)!
Hope that can help you,, take a look on online demo,
http://oss.sheetjs.com/js-xlsx/
peek in source code or file an issue on GH? but I think you will have to do most coding on youre own
I think you want to reduce the size of your excel file. If yes then you can do it by saving it as xlsb i.e., Excel Binary Workbook format. Further, you can reduce your file size by deleting all the blank cells.
I have a C# program that takes a legacy report file and maps to an Excel. It was running ok but we changed the process. The legacy program groups all the detail rows together and my program breaks page rather than before when they provided all the pages. this had added to run time about 4 times as long.
I have been told that if I can manually modify Excel to create 'proper' output for input file, It can speed things up a good bit.
also go to an Excel code-behind or add-in which would run from Dxcel and thus be faster
Can someone direct me how to apply these 2 ideas?
We do the code now as an array and write the entire row rather than cell by cell.
here is copy of the code: http://www.mediafire.com/?cebg17u5wl0ir25
Automation of Office applications is generally very slow. I just encountered this problem while trying to create a complicated graphic with Visio form c# code. It lasted about 30s. Now i create a SVG-File, that is then opened in Visio. Creating the SVG-File lasts less than 1s now!
I suggest that you export your data as CSV-File and then import it into Excel. Do only the minimum, i.e. the creation of worksheets, the import of the CSV and the formatting, with Excel-automation.
I have a VSTO add in I am looking to implement.
I would like to click a button and a list of products, names, etc would be placed onto the worksheet.
I understand that I could go through each individual item in the list and then write this cell by cell, but is there a way of literally just 'dumping' the data onto the worksheet?
Apologies if this is a really thick question.
Nope, there is no easy way to just 'dump' the data. You're going to have to do it the hard way. Just google for some examples, it's easy enough.
http://www.google.nl/search?q=c%23+export+data+to+excel
That depends on where your "list of products, names, etc" are coming from. If those items are fixed, you can create a template document with a prepared worksheet containing these items. Put this document into an embedded resource of your program. When you want to create a new worksheet from this template, extract your resource to a temporary file and use the Excel API to copy the worksheet from your template to your working document.
Sounds perhaps more complicated than it is. Here
Read a file from a resource and write it to disk in C#
you find an example how to accomplish the "extract file from resource to temporary file" part.