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POWhat (if there are any) are the (free) alternatives to COM interop with MS Excel using .NET?
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copied!<p>Background: I'm trying to make a decision on whether to go down the road of automating Excel using C# via Interop. I'm certainly not a VBA guy and for numerous reasons, I'd prefer not to go down that road. I don't know much about other options, and I'm really not looking to buy anything.</p> <p>Performance is massively important.</p> <p>I've tried to find references on using Interop to automate Excel and it seems rather sparse. Some of the better stuff is <a href="http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0735621322" rel="nofollow">dated</a> and other references just don't cover a lot of the material. Many folks cite the fact that a lot of the existing material spends time focusing on differences in version of MS Office. I'm also wondering whether the improvements that have been claimed with moving to .NET 4 are material.</p> <p>Edit: The crux of what I'm trying to accomplish is complete automation of fairly involved and intricate formatting as well as some pretty heavy analysis (linear regression). I need to chart data once analyzed/calculated and the chart formatting is really important because the MBA's I work with say it is. I guess all of this is possible via VBA but I don't know for sure because I'm not a VBA guy. Think macro type stuff with the app hidden so it's running as a background process. Performance is critical (one of the reasons I question COM's appropriateness). VBA may even be off the table due to its performance considerations.</p> <p>Now, for the question.</p> <p>The best way I can ask this succinctly is: <strong>is there a laundry list of stuff you can't do with Interop in Excel that you'd like to be able to do</strong>? How have you gotten around it in your development experiences?</p> <p>If there really isn't anything you can't do with Interop (see comments below) and it's the best fit for what I'm intending to do, <strong>what is the best way to go about learning to use it</strong> given that COM and the Excel object model can be a fairly intimidating undertaking. Are there really good references out there?</p> <p>If there's a better way for me to go about the above, can you tell me about it? Excel DNA was mentioned but I can't see it being much more helpful than allowing the creation of user-defined C# functions that can get to a backend server app or database somewhere.</p>

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