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Data export from DataGrid to Excel is very common task, and it can be solved with different ways, and chosen way depend on kind of app which you are design. If you are developing app for enterprise, and it will be installed on several computes, then you can to advance a claim (system requirements) with which your app will be work for client. Or customer will advance system requirements on which your app should work. In this case you can use COM for export (use infrastructure of Excel or OpenOffice). This approach will give you much more flexibility and give you possibility to use all features of Excel app.

Introduction

Let’s imagine a scenario in which you have a series of Excel files (.xlsx) on your computer but you don’t have any Microsoft Office installed. What can we do if we want to examine the content of these files?
In this article we will describe a small Silverlight application allowing you to open and view these files and also create line series graphs. I used this exercise as laboratory to familiarize myself with some of the new features of Silverlight 4 like, for instance, drag&drop of files from local folders to the application, drag&drop between controls in the application, right click event handling, theming and so on.

In this post I will briefly describe the files used and a quick example of how to tie the Export Method to a simple button in Silverlight.  Below you will find all the source code, including a Silverlight Datagrid I extended to automatically export its contents to an Excel file without any additional work from the developer [Click here for Demo].  I will explain this cool control in my next post.