Excel on the Server

Occasionally I'll talk about various server based products that generate Office documents. This has been somethinig that many large companies have done for years and in recent years we have seen 3rd party vendors build solutions. I got some feedback from Excel gurul Stephane Rodriguez and felt it deserved a larger audience. I think some of his points are valid.

Stephane says .....

Thanks for providing me the opportunity to say why native Excel generation is important.

1) On the server side, Excel is not reliable. It blows up in every possible ways. One of the worst is probably those blocking VBA-related error boxes, or an Excel process that will not go away. That's a fact, and there are numerous KB articles about that. Part of it is certainly VBA/COM related problems (who are maintained by Summit Software, but may be less now than in the past, now that gears have changed a bit...)

2) Excel OM is way too slow. It's an out-proc. Obligatory marshalling makes it a x10/x100 beast.

3) Excel OM, when not properly used, will recalculate cells after each object model call. There are things you can avoid, there are things you can't. Some of these require skills, some other require knowledge of the underlying Excel works.

4) Excel for cross-platform needs. In reporting software, you might want to generate Excel workbooks (or other Office documents) from non-Windows boxes.

5) Native support for Excel cells, charts, lets you do things without writing hundreds of lines of automation code just because of the existance of some level of abstraction to serve a particular need. Example : template-based layouts, or template-based formatting conditions.

I could think of other incentives, but then I think if your business needs that kind of feature, you definitely need to take a look at what's available out there.

shameless pluggy,

xlsgen, native Excel generator http://www.excelgenerator.com