Aspose or Spreadsheet gear

Question

Among Aspose and spreadsheet gear which one is best when it comes to transferring data from database to excel and reading data in an excel sheet using C#, or is there any other better suggestion for it. This should also include applying conditional formatting, chart preparation and all excel functionality via C#.

Answer 1

It has been a while since I tested Aspose but can say that SpreadsheetGear has been our spreadsheet API of choice for a number of years. We have done a lot of work mapping Spreadsheet data and complex functionality to SQL databases and to web applications and back again via C# - mostly with an ASP.Net Web API 2. Most Excel native functionality is available and aspects such as conditional formatting have been recently improved in the ssgear 2017 version.

Limitations to be aware of are that Excel Macros are not accessible from the API - we use C# to do that work. You can however add Macros to .xlsm template files for client download and use.

The API is very quick with small - medium spreadsheets (< 1MB) but larger spreadsheets (> 5MB) can be slow to work with. The problem here appears to be the load / open time of the spreadsheet rather than the speed of interaction. That is a particular problem with an API application where user activity is based on discrete requests rather than a continuous session where the open spreadsheet can be maintained in memory.

Support has always be very good both here and directly from SSGear.