XLS and ASP.NET

[Johnny Fugazzi]

I am looking for some guidance here. I have an Excel spreadsheet that is
used for the generation of estimates and sales information. It is quite
large, and has a thousand or so input fields. There is one of these files
for each sale the company bids. The nature of some of the data on in the
XLS file is confidential, so it must be hidden from some people whom I would
like to update other areas of this workbook. I would also prefer if the
user never actually touches the workbook, but rather just feeds it some
values.

A thought came up in a meeting, and the question was raised as to whether a
webpage could read and write key values to an excel workbook, while not
displaying others. I have been able to do this using OWC10 and an XML
version of the workbook, but it is painfully slow. The page takes 5 minutes
to load each time the xml-workbook is loaded. I am sure this is due in
large part to the size of the XML file (6.5MB).

Can any reccomend a better option for this scenario? The Workbook is not
arranged in tabular format, so I cannot retreive values by row. The values
need to be retreived and updated by either Cell number or Name.

Thank you in advance.

 

[Alvin Bruney [MVP]]

One thought is to write a webpage that queries the XLS underneath retrieving
selective info to display in the spreadsheet. For instance, you can use the
XMLDom model to iterate the XLS file and retrieve data based on user
credentials and public/sensitive information. You would not have to load the
entire XLS document since you actually parse its content with code. The
content is then assembled into a webpage spreadsheet - say owc11. Maybe you
embed some formulas etc to help with your calculation etc. Maybe you make
some columns and rows editable as well. Then the user clicks a save button,
and the changed data is written to the XLS file. This is a rough overview of
the idea, feel free to run with it...