title: Programmatically creating Excel 2007 Sheets
body: <p>I'm trying to create Excel 2007 Documents programmatically. Now, there are two ways I've found:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Manually creating the XML, as outlined in <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/150339/generating-an-excel-file-in-aspnet#150368">this post</a></li>
  <li>Using a Third Party Library like <a href="http://www.codeplex.com/ExcelPackage" rel="nofollow noreferrer">ExcelPackage</a>.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Currently, I use ExcelPackage, which has some really serious drawbacks and issues. As I do not need to create overly complex Excel sheets (the most "complicated" thing is that I explicitely need to set a cell type to numeric or text), I 'm looking towards Option 1 next, but I just wonder if there are any other good and supported ways to generate Excel 2007 Sheets? Bonus Points if they can be created without having to save them to the harddrive, i.e. generate and directly output them into a stream.</p>
  
  <p>.net 3.0 is the target here, no 3.5 goodness :(</p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit:</strong> Thanks so far. The XML SDK is indeed 3.5 only, but Russian Roulet... erm... COM Interop is also something I want to avoid whenever possible, especially since Excel 2007 has a somewhat complicated but still rather easy to create document format. I'll have a look at the various links and hints posted.</p>