While working on document generation on server side, where Open XML SDK is the tool for a developer, I came across a scenario where the requirement was to generate Open XML based Excel Workbooks (XLSX), from older format of Excel Workbooks (XLS) files which contained a huge amount of data, like million rows in a single sheet!

We were able to employ XSL Transform technique to very effeciently generate a part (sheet.xml) of Open XML workbook. I have talked about this whole scenario at the following post:

How to efficiently generate OpenXML Workbook from Excel files containing very large amount of data – Visual Studio Office Development (VSOD) Support Team – Site Home – MSDN Blogs

This method is quite fast as well as extensible. During my testing, the generation of an Open XML workbook from a data XML containing around 1150 rows with 30+ columns each, took even less than a second to generate. Also, this technique can be extended to pull in data from a back-end database as XML and generate Open XML workbooks on the fly.

Have a look into this article and feel free to drop you comments/queries here or on the above post, I will surely try to answer them.

One Response to “How to use XSLT to transform very large amount of data into Open XML workbook”

  1. Andreas says:

    Hello Manvir, I’m sorry for using the comment function to get in contact with you but you helped me at the Open XML SDK Microsoft Forum but I ran into some other problems and can’t solve it.

    The thread topic was “Dynamically add content controls into my docx”

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