Excel.....oh that question!

[jongilbey]

I'm sure I'm not the only one to wonder about this.. so here goes..

We want to produce native excel spreadsheets on the server - Microsoft in their infinite wisdom advise against any COM Objects/ActiveX manipulation on the server since it is unattended and could hang on a warning/error message.

I looked into creating an HTML page and renaming the file extension as XLS and inserting a document header to trick the browser into believing it was a valid Excel file.. however... Microsoft got wise to this in Excel 2007 and now pop up a nice meaningless message for the user to ponder - which obviously gets your average Joe into a bit of flap and they don't like it one bit.

So in brief can anyone recommend a way of producing an 2003/2007 compatible excel spreadsheet on a server that is unattended?

TIA
Jon