I'm looking for a nice library for editing and/or generating Excel documents on our Windows server. I feel that the open xml sdk is probably the way to go, but to me the learning curve seems steep and our dev time is limited. I think that it just shouldn't be that difficult to edit an Excel document. I'm ready to reinvent the wheel, but thought it would be worthwhile to ask first whether there is a good project/library out there that wraps open xml and makes interacting with Excel easier.

In this official MS tutorial, the code that retrieves the value of a cell is dozens of lines long.

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb739834.aspx?cs-save-lang=1&cs-lang=vb#ManipulateOpenXMLExcelPowerPoint_RetrievetheValueofaCellinaWorksheet>

That seems incredibly unwieldy, and I'm hoping for a better interface to this functionality.

Note: I've puzzled about how to make this question more StackOverflow friendly, but I don't know of a better way.