Epplus

Unlike some libraries that feel like they were ported from VBA, EPPlus feels native to C#. The object hierarchy is logical:

var worksheet = package.Workbook.Worksheets.Add("Sheet1"); worksheet.Cells["A1"].Value = "Hello World"; worksheet.Cells["A1"].Style.Font.Bold = true;

He dove into the EPPlus source code on GitHub. There it was: ExcelPackage.Load(stream) deserialized every XML part inside the .xlsx zip archive. Every shared string. Every drawing. Every fragile reference. The library was brilliant, faithful to the Open XML spec—but it treated every load like a cathedral restoration.

Tonight, something was wrong.

EPPlus is incredibly fast. It does not require Excel to be installed on the server (a massive advantage over Interop), and it is optimized for memory management.

Unlike some libraries that feel like they were ported from VBA, EPPlus feels native to C#. The object hierarchy is logical:

var worksheet = package.Workbook.Worksheets.Add("Sheet1"); worksheet.Cells["A1"].Value = "Hello World"; worksheet.Cells["A1"].Style.Font.Bold = true;

He dove into the EPPlus source code on GitHub. There it was: ExcelPackage.Load(stream) deserialized every XML part inside the .xlsx zip archive. Every shared string. Every drawing. Every fragile reference. The library was brilliant, faithful to the Open XML spec—but it treated every load like a cathedral restoration.

Tonight, something was wrong.

EPPlus is incredibly fast. It does not require Excel to be installed on the server (a massive advantage over Interop), and it is optimized for memory management.