Port Excel spreadsheet to c#

Question

I been searching for the past while for an application which will port a excel workbook to c# code the closest I found was spreadsheetgear but its not of great use, I've slowly come to the conclusion that I will have to write the code myself. Does anyone know of any freeware command line tool or opensource project which will accomplish this?

The reason that I wish to do this is simple, Excel\\VBA is terribly slow even when optimized some computations can take days, but due to is simplistic use, excel is a standard tool for model building. We have a java port which is dramatically quicker, but we are constantly updating the model and as such each minor change must be checked and recheck which takes time.

My aim is this, have a tool which will take an excel file as input parse all the formulas and values and output c# equivalent code, the few subroutines will be manually ported. A graphical design will then be manually created which will wrap around this generated code. I have the generally code structure laid out in my mind, how I will accomplish this aswell as the libraries that I will use for reading excel files. But as I'm quite certain this is not an original problem, nor do I think the solution is overly difficult I would presume that there is some public project?

Answer 1

If you want to read Excel files from C# the VSTO Developer Center may be a good start.

As a side note, I think if you are trying to port general Excel applications to C# automatically you have quite a big project. For a small subset of applications where the Excel sheets follow a similar pattern it might be reasonable to do.

But to really benefit from porting Excel applications to C# you will have to rewrite them to use appropriate data structures in C#.