The idea and the implementation
The idea was to Microsoft Excel COM interop with ASP.NET – I had seen examples of the use of tables to generate interop, but it seemed no one had actually done anything.

Since I had not really done any ASP.NET orders from the ground up, and it was mostly cobbled together only to see if it could be done so that the software development methods such as “Copy and Paste.

It was initially a problem with Excel, such as the Windows version I use is in Finnish, and my Office 2007 is the English version. Every time I tried something in the table as a value from a cell, it would throw an exception. Fortunately, some Googling gave me the answer to the currently executing thread to the locale en-US, the fixed and let me continue.

Finally, I found ways to do everything I needed: first steps and the specific cells’ values and formulas. Then it was for the creation of the JavaScript-based interface for IT, which is essentially a very very simple inline table edit the changes on the server with Ajax.

Demonstration
I unfortunately do not have a server that can ASP.NET, and it is not really a very good idea to make them on a live server for real users, either on things that I tell you about in a bit … but here is a Screencast I made to you an idea:

From the screenshot, you can see how it first loads the Excel spreadsheet of the current data in the network, and if changes are made, all changes that affect the values in the table are included in the network as well.

So is this a Google Spreadsheets Killer?

Well … Maybe.

As you can see from the above, it is a workable concept. However, it has a number of questions, because Excel is not a “server” type of application.

Excel is as something that the user interacts with directly, as in a desktop application. If you have a formula incorrectly, it would take you a pop-up and you close it, and the like.

If you use a wrong formula in the JS-grid, it is in Excel, which is a pop … but there is no one to close it. It is in fact the whole app with the pop: No response to the news until the popup is closed, and all actions that throw an exception.

Theoretically you could use the server so that it is an application that automatically click on the pop-ups Excel displays to close them … but I’m not sure whether the work so well.

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