Overview

XlsIO can be used to generate a new XLS document from scratch, extract data from an existing spreadsheet document or even edit an existing spreadsheet.

Essential XlsIO has support for creating richly formatted spreadsheets from scratch. Advanced features like DataValidation, Conditional Formatting and Charts can also be applied to cells in the spreadsheet created using XlsIO.

You can also easily open an existing spreadsheet and edit or insert content into it. This lets you create Xls document templates using MS Excel with rich cell-formsts but without any meaningful data in the cells. You can then open such templates using XlsIO and insert content into these documents dynamically during runtime at the right location and distribute the newly created Xls documents to your end-users.

The below image illustrates the data flow of this process.

There are some features like VBA Macros which cannot be created using XlsIO's API. These features can instead be made available in a template which was created using MS Excel. XlsIO will preserve this information while editing and saving these template files.

Essential XlsIO also provides APIs to let you read the existing contents of an Xls document. This lets you create applications that simply consumes the data available in an Xls document.

XlsIO lets you read both the content and any format settings in the cells.

You can also, of course, both read and write content into the same document.