What is a Designer Spreadsheet

Do You Want to Speed Up Development?

You can use Aspose.Cells to create Excel files from scratch with the help of its flexible API. One of the most common uses for Aspose.Cells is to create and populate Excel files with data, which may come from an existing database, a user or other sources, dynamically. As well as adding data to Excel files, you’ll also need to write to apply formatting (look and feel).

Formatting takes time. What could speed up development?

The Solution - Designer Spreadsheets

To speed up your development, Aspose.Cells offers the exciting feature designer spreadsheet.

What is a Designer Spreadsheet?

A designer spreadsheet is an Excel file created using Microsoft Excel in which all formatting are already applied and the contents can be decided at design time. It’s more like a template file that doesn’t contain any data but just the formatting, as shown below:

Designer spreadsheet

How to Use It?

After creating a designer spreadsheet, use Aspose.Cells to read the designer spreadsheet and add data to its specified positions (according to the pre-defined format settings) at runtime. For example, in the screenshot above, you can see that we already decided at design time to add Product Name, Category Name, Quantity Per Unit and Units In Stock columns. They don’t have any data yet: this is be added at runtime. The above figure shows a very simple spreadsheet but designer spreadsheets save you time even on complex spreadsheet.

Smart Markers

Additionally, Aspose.Cells lets you add smart markers to the designer spreadsheet. Smart markers are processed at runtime using the WorkbookDesigner class’s Process method. This can help you write less code and still get great result.

Find out more about smart markers.