The other day I was working on some code to export data to excel. I usually create an XML file, which can be read with Excel 2003. The problem though was that the size of the XML file can become very huge and sometimes it would take quite some time to do the exportation based on the amount of data. I would say that for small amount of data this solution still works, however for me it was just not useful anymore. I was looking for a third party control, which could export the data right away to Excel, without requiring any Excel on the server and which would be fast enough to generate a big excel file. I tried few components, but I think the best and most useful control is Aspose's Excel - with just few lines of code you are ready to export the data to an excel worksheet. I love the ImportFromDataReader function :) Ofcourse there are other goodies in the component included as well, like charting, summing, etc.. The component works in both ways read and write. I recommend it to everyone.