Any negatives to generating ms excel report on the web?
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One of our clients wishes to view company MS Excel reports through their corporate intranet so to accomodate this, I'm referencing the "Microsoft Office 11 Object Library" DLL in vs2005. Through this DLL, I can create any ms excel report I wish. One of my co-workers however, strongly believes generating ms excel reports by using a copy of ms office on the server is a bad idea, however, up to this point, I've been unable to find any bugs in my sample application. So my question is, are there any serious downsides to generating ms excel reports on the web this way? The only problem I've come up with so far is the fact that ms office is not a multi-threaded application. Meaning I had to setup some code so that if one user is currently generating a report, a 2nd user cannot begin their report generation until the 1st user is finished. Other than that though, I haven't had any problems however this is going to be a very involved application (they use 57 different excel reports) so I don't want to spend the next month developing an app using this process only to find out it was the wrong approach to take. Thanks. -Goalie35
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One of our clients wishes to view company MS Excel reports through their corporate intranet so to accomodate this, I'm referencing the "Microsoft Office 11 Object Library" DLL in vs2005. Through this DLL, I can create any ms excel report I wish. One of my co-workers however, strongly believes generating ms excel reports by using a copy of ms office on the server is a bad idea, however, up to this point, I've been unable to find any bugs in my sample application. So my question is, are there any serious downsides to generating ms excel reports on the web this way? The only problem I've come up with so far is the fact that ms office is not a multi-threaded application. Meaning I had to setup some code so that if one user is currently generating a report, a 2nd user cannot begin their report generation until the 1st user is finished. Other than that though, I haven't had any problems however this is going to be a very involved application (they use 57 different excel reports) so I don't want to spend the next month developing an app using this process only to find out it was the wrong approach to take. Thanks. -Goalie35
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Thanks for the link indianet. After reading that article, I'll definately be avoiding server-side excel automation. Can anyone then recomend an alternative to this problem? Creating a CSV file isn't really an option because the reports this company uses contain tabs, background colors, a few pivottables, and an image or two. Our current backup plan is to use Crystal reports which can be exported in xls format however there are a ton of headaches associated with this approach also such as the ability to properly align all of the cells and how to create tabs. Thanks again. -Goalie35