1. How To Use ADO.NET to Retrieve and Modify Records in an Excel Workbook With Visual Basic .NET
2. DataSet to Excel in Two steps – with Different Styles- by Krishna_accent
3. And finally comes our good old CSV files.

the first one seems to be ok. but have little more work to be done on coding. the second is a  really good one, but again we need excel to be installed, which again run out of our needs.

using CSV is ok for unformatted Comma Separated Values.

But Recently I found Carlos Aguilar Mares has this wonderful FREE component called ExcelXmlWriter , to export data to excel. it doesn’t need excel to be installed and it can be used to generate formatted excel workbooks with very few lines of code.

   1:  using CarlosAg.ExcelXmlWriter;

   2:   

   3:  class TestApp {

   4:      static void Main(string[] args) {

   5:          Workbook book = new Workbook();

   6:          Worksheet sheet = book.Worksheets.Add("Sample");

   7:          WorksheetRow row =  sheet.Table.Rows.Add();

   8:          row.Cells.Add("Hello World");

   9:          book.Save(@"c:\test.xls");

  10:      }

  11:  }

the download has a very easy to understand help file explaining how to use this. you can download it in his website here.

Clean and simple isn’t it ?

Here is a little introduction about PDFSharp:

• PDFsharp is the Open Source library that easily creates PDF documents from any .NET language.
  The same drawing routines can be used to create PDF documents, draw on the screen, or send output to any printer.
• It can use either GDI+ or WPF.
• It includes support for Unicode in PDF files.
• It also includes MigraDoc Lite which brings you all the high-level functionality not included in PDFsharp.

Using PDFSharp is very simple. the samples in the official download file are more than enough to learn the functionality of PDFSharp.here is a little piece of code I used to merge A collection of PDFs in a folder to a single PDF file.

   1:  PdfDocument inputDocument=

   2:                  PdfReader.Open(file.FullName,PdfDocumentOpenMode.Import);

   3:  int count = inputDocument.PageCount;

   4:    for (int idx = 0; idx < count; idx++)

   5:     {

   6:         // Get the page from the external document...

   7:         PdfPage page = inputDocument.Pages[idx];

   8:         // ...and add it to the output document.

   9:         outputDocument.AddPage(page);

  10:     }

  11:  

  12:  outputDocument.Save(filename);

if you want to download the full sample I created download it  here.

if you want to download pdfSharp Library visit the site below:

http://www.pdfsharp.com/PDFsharp