Introducing Excel Library for .NET Core

The majority of data on the web is arranged in rows and columns, and Excel spreadsheets are the most common, familiar way for storing, analyzing, calculating, sorting, and arranging data. If you're looking for a high-speed solution to handle budgets, transactions, profit & loss statements, and profitability analyses, you likely need more power than a basic web app can provide. The new GrapeCity Documents for Excel, a high-speed, small-footprint spreadsheet API based on VSTO for .NET Core, supports most Excel features and allows you to deploy on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Azure.

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The feature set helps you work with a variety of features like importing spreadsheets, calculate data, query, generate, and export any spreadsheet, add sorting, filtering, formatting, conditional formatting and validate data, add grouping, sparklines, charts, shapes, pictures, slicers, comments, hyperlinks, themes etc. In addition, you can import existing Excel templates, add data and save the spreadsheets back.

You can also use GrapeCity Documents for Excel together with Spread.Sheets, another Spread product that is included in SpreadJS. GrapeCity Documents for Excel works on the server side to import and export Excel template files. Spread.Sheets works in the browser (client side) as a viewer or editor. Learn more about Spread.Sheets.

How would you use a .NET Excel spreadsheet API?

With Documents for Excel, you can create spreadsheets like:

• Event budget
• Sales report
• Cost analysis
• Customer profitability analysis
• Contacts list
• To-dos list
• Financial KPIs
• Income statements
• Monthly budget
• Aging report
• Annual financial report
• Project cost tracker

Why go with GrapeCity Documents for Excel API library?

Take your pick:

1. Generate, load, edit, analyze, convert, save Excel workbooks on .NET Core with full support on Windows, MAC and Linux
2. General Spreadsheets with fast performance, small footprint
3. Operate over range of cells
4. Format your content
5. Add conditional formatting
6. Add tables
7. Validate your data
8. Add formulas
9. Analyze better by grouping your data
10. Configure page setup
11. Filter your data
12. Apply sorting
13. Add sparklines
14. Add detailed data visualization with charts
15. Add shapes and pictures
16. Filter data with slicers
17. Comment on your data
18. Pivot tables to analyze your data more
19. Add themes to change the look of your spreadsheet
20. Use workbook functions
21. Work with worksheet
22. Import and export Excel templates
23. Integrate with Spread.Sheets products
24. Convert worbook to PDF
25. Use cases

1. Generate, load, edit, analyze, convert, and save Excel workbooks on .NET Core with full support on Windows, MAC and Linux

As Documents for Excel supports .NET Core, it acts as a cross-platform solution, which means that you can generate and work with Excel spreadsheets using a single code base that can run across .NET Core, Mono, .NET Framework and Xamarin platforms.

2. Generate general spreadsheets with fast performance, small footprint

Documents for Excel is fast. The lightweight architecture makes it an efficient tool that offers high performance and memory efficiency while generating or working with Excel spreadsheets.

3. Operate over cell ranges

In order to work with spreadsheets and modify data, you need to access the range of data. Documents for Excel supports following operations when working with range of cells:

• Access cells, rows, and columns
• Access each area of a range
• Access ranges in various ways
• Cut, Copy, and Paste a range
• Work with a used range of cells
• Get a row count or column count
• Hide a row or column
• Insert or delete cells
• Insert or delete rows and columns
• Merge cells
• Set values to a range
• Set row height and column width

Try the demo.

4. Format your spreadsheet content

Intuitive, attractive spreadsheets are a must in professional enterprize apps. This Excel API includes:

• Alignment (HorizontalAlignment, VerticalAlignment, ReadingOrder, ShrinkToFit, Orientation, Wrap Text)
• Borders (BorderLineStyle (Dashed, DashDot, Dotted, Double, Medium, Hair, etc.)
• Fill Colors (Solid fill, Pattern fill, Linear gradient fill, Rectangular gradient fill)
• Fonts (Font color, Font size, Font name, Bold, Italic, Underline, Strikethrough, Superscript, Subscript)
• Number Formats (Excel-style)
• Security settings
• Styles

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5. Add conditional formatting

Depending upon the information on the cells, you can add conditional formatting or highlight your cells based on some rules. If the cell values match the rule, formatting can be applied. The following conditional formatting rules can be applied on the range of cells:

• Cell Value
• Average
• Color Scale
• Data Bar
• Icon Sets
• Top Bottom
• Unique
• Expression

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6. Add tables

Tables help you to organize data in rows and columns, and you can assign a range of data to the table. These operations are supported for tables:

• Add or remove a table in a worksheet
• Apply filtering to a table column
• Apply sorting to a table column
• Apply either built-in or custom table styles
• Access each range of a table
• Add or remove a table column
• Perform calculations for a specific table range

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7. Validate your data

With Documents for Excel, you can restrict the data entered into the cells by applying data validations like whole number, decimal, list, date, time, text length, and custom. This also helps in generating spreadsheets with fewer errors!

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8. Add formulas

The most powerful feature of Excel is the ability to add formulas to the data that can recalculate the results for you even if you change the data. Documents for Excel helps you replicate the same advantages, and you can apply these formulas to your spreadsheet:

• Hundreds of built-in Excel functions
• Array formulas
• Dirty and Calculate methods
• Table formuas

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9. Analyze better by grouping your data

Grouping is a vital tool in organizing and analyzing data; it helps you summarize your data and easily navigate it. Documents for Excel provides these methods to group your data:

• Collapse group
• Create a range group
• Show specific level group
• Ungroup range

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10. Configure page setup

Documents for Excel supports all the standard settings for determining how to print your spreadsheets, including:

• Page header/footer
• Page number
• Page margins
• Page orientation
• Paper scaling
• Paper size
• Print area
• Sheet print settings
• Row/column repeat

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11. Filter your data

Filtering is a must in spreadsheets, and Documents for Excel API supports filtering on number, text, color, icon, and date.

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12. Apply sorting

In addition to filtering your data, you can also sort your data in multiple ways with Documents for Excel. You can sort on value, font color, interior, icon, or create a custom sorting list. This can help you identify the information faster as the data before you is sorted in the order you choose.

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13. Add sparklines

Documents for Excel provides the ability to add sparklines, mini charts within the boundaries of a cell that show trends for increase or decrease of values over a year. Line, column and win/loss are the sparklines supported by Documents for Excel.

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14. Add detailed data visualization with charts

Documents for Excel provides comprehensive API for adding charts to your spreadsheets. There are 50+ chart types that you can use with detailed chart properties. You can

• Add charts to a worksheet
• Add data series
• Customize chart titles
• Cutomize chart legends
• Access and customize each data series
• Customize each data point in a data series
• Add, remove, or customize each data label in a series
• Access and customize a group of series
• Access and customize value axes, category axes, and series axes

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15. Add shapes and pictures

To enhance your data in the spreadsheet, you can add drawing objects in the form of shapes and pictures with Documents for Excel. You can insert arrows, lines, charts, slicers, pictures, and general shapes. In addition, you can fill shapes, add text to them and set the line styles on them. You can also add, delete, cut, copy and duplicate pictures.

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16. Filter data with slicers

Slicers make it easier and faster to apply filters to tables and pivot tables. While you can filter data with standard filtering capabilities of Documents for Excel, slicers are more kind of visual filter to slice data you exactly want to see. You can:

• Add a custom slicer style
• Add slicers to pivot tables
• Add slicers to tables
• Apply built-in style to slicer
• Configure slicer layout
• Auto-filter table with slicer
• Copy slicer
• Cut slicer
• Duplicate slicer
• Use slicer to filter table
• Use a slicer to clear a filter

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17. Add comments

You cannot put every type of information on your spreadsheets. Sometimes, you want to review the data and add comments for any modifications, or want to add notes, or put short summaries over data etc. With Documents for Excel, you can -

• Add comment to a cell
• Clear comments
• Configure comment's layout
• Set rich text for comment

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18. Use pivot tables for more analysis

Sometimes, you need to go beyond than just having a table, calculations and formulas and extract significance from a larger data set. Without explicitly setting formulas to perform the calculations you can play around with different arrangements of data and summarize values. You can do following to work with pivot tables using Documents for Excel:

• Create pivot tables
• Set field's summarize function
• Filter items in pivot tables
• Modify pivot field subtotal type
• Refresh pivot table

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19. Add themes to change the look of your spreadsheet

You don't need to apply specific formatting on your cells, but can make use of several in-built themes to change the way how your spreadsheets look using just one simple line of code. You can also build your own custom themes or change existing workbook themes to apply on your spreadsheets.

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20. Use workbook functions

All above features can be worked upon through the workbook class. You use these functions with a workbooks:

• Configure workbook view
• Create new workbook
• Import csv file to workbook
• Import csv file to workbook with options
• Only import data from Excel
• Import Excel file
• Do not recalucate after opening Excel
• Import Excel file with password
• Save workbook to csv file
• Save workbook to csv file with options

• Save to Excel file

• Save to Excel file with password

• Convert workbook ToJson and FromJson

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21. Work with worksheet

You can add several worksheets and arrange data in it with Documents for Excel. These functions are possible to use with worksheets:

• Access a worksheet
• Activate a worksheet
• Add a worksheet
• Configure worksheet view
• Configure worksheet properties
• Delete a worksheet
• Protect worksheet
• Save worksheet to csv file
• Save worksheet to csv file with options
• Unprotect worksheet

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22. Import and export Excel templates

If you have an existing template and just want to modify data, you can load it in Documents for Excel, modify the data, and save it back. This provides an added advantage to working with Documents for Excel because you can create even more advanced spreadsheets by loading such templates and just modify data in it.

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23. Integrate with Spread.Sheets products

While Documents for Excel can help in import and export of Excel templates, in order to finally view or edit data in browser, you can use Documents for Excel with the Spread.Sheets control. Here's how to use it:

• Open an Excel file with Documents for Excel existing on server.
• Export the whole workbook to a JSON string by calling Workbook.ToJson, then transfer the JSON string to client side.
• At client side, Spread.Sheets control will FromJson to let you view the result of the Excel file on server.

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24. Export spreadsheet to PDF

One of the most essential aspects when working with documents is to finally convert it to PDF for long term storage, because this is one format that adds security, data preservation for long-term archiving. With Documents for Excel API, you can directly save a workbook to PDF without creating an Excel file first. These export features are supported:

• Set page setup
• Export
• Text
• Number formats
• Overflow text
• Font effects
• Borders
• Conditional formatting
• Picture
• Fills
• Sparklines
• Table
• Save workbook to PDF
• Save worksheet to PDF
• Set font's folder

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Check out our use cases live!

You can accomplish a plenty use cases to generate simple and complex spreadsheets in your application. Check out Excel Reporting and Excel Templates to see them in action.

Help us evaluate GrapeCity Documents for Excel and let us know what you think about the library? Please leave a comment with us and we 'll get back to you. Thanks!

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