Reading a Excel 2007 Spreadsheet in C#

Question

I've done some googling and there seems to be a plethora of tools for reading excel 2007 spreadsheets using c#. I'd like to know which one performs best and is easy to use.

Answer 1

Frankly, it depends on if you have Excel installed on the machine.

If you have Excel installed, using Microsofts Office APIs is as quick and ( for the price ) painless as you are going to get. That said, if you don't have Excel installed, the question gets much trickier.

Also, note, if you are installing to a web server that is available to the world, using Microsoft's Office APIs often isn't actually legal, as the end user needs to have an office license for you to be legal. If this is the case, and you are developing for redistribution or internet deployment, make sure that the library you are considering has no dependencies on the Office APIs, as their redistribution isn't actually legal either. If you need to, for example, provide a viewer for people that don't have Excel installed, you can't legally use the Office APIs, nor can you use 3rd Parties that depend on that layer. Compliant libraries will make it clear in their description that they don't depend on Excel.