Excel Tabbed Output

I need suggestions for a solid COM component or Library that can produce excel documents from an app. Preferably I'd like to not have the SDK loaded on the machine.

I need to produce not only the document, but I will need the document to have multiple tabs/worksheets, and each has special formatting such as certain columns with a highlight or border, certain columns are a specific width, and this output needs to happen within seconds of pulling the info from SQL Server.

Any suggestions? Also, if you have done this before any time estimates on creating such an app would be very helpful for me to get the RFQ out before tomorrow morning...

All suggestions are welcome.

No worries all... I have found what I've been looking for, however, if any of you want to post your feedback feel free.

If anyone wants to know what the results are check back with me in a few weeks and I'll let you know how development is going.

Wil,

What application / component did you end up finding for your project?

Yes please Will

I often need to create reports on the fly. While I do make them "Tab Delimited" and stick an XLS extension on the end it would be nice to be able to add a little formatting in there when needed.

Anything you come up with would be very interesting.

Cheers

It came down to three choices.

1. http://www.afalinasoft.com/ | XL Report.Net
(pretty good)


2. http://excelwriter.softartisans.com/ | ExcelWriter
(even better)

3. http://www.fpoint.com | Farpoint Spread
(best of them all)


I ended up choosing Spread by Farpoint. The features are just too many to list. They have a free trial ( they all do ), and the online documentation is very comprehensive so even though you should have a bit of a disadvantage when trying to incorporate it into a project for the first time, you should get up to speed quickly with their docs.

The component works with any COM client and .net as well.

There's also a PHP library called Biff that does a pretty good job writing XLS documents. It actually writes the raw data in XLS formats rather than just tab-delimiting text strings. I'm not sure whether it'll do multi-tab output, as I've never had to put it to that use. But for shoving some SQL rows into a well-formatted XLS document, it sure does the trick. Only thing is that it writes a couple of headers (cache-control and one other) that MSIE chokes on. When I commented those out, it worked like a charm.