How can I programmatically create, read, write an excel without having office installed?

c# excel

I'm confused as hell with all the bazillion ways to read/write/create excel files. VSTO, OLEDB, etc, but they all seem to have the requirement that office must be installed.

Here is my situation: I need to develop an app which will take an excel file as input, do some calculations and create a new excel file which will basically be a modification of the first excel file. All with the constraint that the machine that runs this may not have office installed. (Don't ask why...)

I need to support all excel formats. The only saving grace is that the formats spreadsheets themselves are really simple. Just a bunch of columns and values, nothing fancy. And unfortunately no CSV as the end user might not even know what a CSV file is.

write your excel in HTML table format:

<html>
<body>
  <table>
    <tr>
    <td style="background-color:#acc3ff">Cell1</td>
    <td style="font-weight:bold">Cell2</td>
    </tr>
  </table>
</body>
</html>

and give your file an xls extension. Excel will convert it automatically

Without Office installed you'll need something designed to understand the Excel binary file format (unless you only want to open Office 2007 .xlsx files).

The best I've found (and that I use) is SpreadsheetGear, which in addition to being .NET native, is much faster and more stable then the COM/OLE solutions (which I've used in the past)

How can I programmatically create, read, write an excel without having office installed?

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