rendering .xls Excel files

[JesseM1]

I'm currently writing an application that compiles a lot of information to PDF, including Excel files.

I was hoping to find some way of rendering an Excel spreadsheet without using Excel. Let me explain:

All the products out there that print Excel to PDF, export Excel sheets to JPEG or BMP, export Excel sheets to PDF, display Excel sheets on the monitor, etc... or in ANY way try to render an Excel sheet use Excel to do it.

In other words, no program tries to guess what the Excel sheet looks like without physically using MS Excel to tell it what the sheet looks like.

I was wondering if anyone knew an exception to this rule. Is there anything out there that can render an Excel sheet as a graphic, PDF, or anything else that does not use Excel to tell it how to draw this image?

 

[combo]

Try OpenOffice, import 'xls' => export to 'pdf'.

combo

 

[JesseM1]

Thanks a lot for responding and for your advice.

I should clarify better what I want, though. I was hoping for some sort of solution that could be distributed via CD along with the program.

Ideally, this would be some sort of middleware or libraries that I could use in the program (written in C# in VS.NET 2003), but in the case that such programming resources don't exist, a less elegant solution may suffice.

The solution that Adobe Acrobat 6.0 uses to load and render .xls files is to have an Excel plugin that is called whenever someone wants to convert .xls to .pdf, but this requires Excel to be installed on the host computer.