A pre-wedding post

3 days from now (actually 2 days 22 hours and 30 minutes) I'll be a married man. This can at least partially explain the lack of writing.
Last week I tried to find a method to write an Escel file from C#. This thing appears to be a bigger problem than can be expected mainly because the direct method, using OLE, is SLOW. I used it for reading the file, 10 sheets of 4 columns and 600 lines. It takes approximately 10 minutes using the OLE. That's a NO-GO! So we started digging and found that Excel readers are not so rare. Though not so common as one would think they ought to be. We took one and voila, it takes 5 seconds to load and display. Yep, displaying such a large dataset takes a bit of time.
As for the writing, we're still searching. We've found a tool to convert the XMLs of the office2007 to the Excel 2000 we use. But writing the XMLs is problematic, it appears that M$ keeps things as nasty as possible even in places they can't be.
So at this moment we're still looking for solutions.
BTW there are commercial components that do the job, but we want the control over the resulting format, after a minor error with the reader we have all the reasons to dig into the source-code in the writing component.

That's for now, and I'll write again after the marriage, probably at the beginning of 2008:)