If you want to access Microsoft Office files from within your .NET, SharePoint or Java applications, Aspose can help. Choose only the components you need or take advantage of comprehensive Aspose.Total suites for .NET, Java, SharePoint, JasperReports and SQL Server Reporting Services for complete application design flexibility.

“With Aspose, developers can manage a number of files they can’t natively access through Visual Studio. Aspose is the universal key to files, for developers,” said Danny Cooper, Associate Director of Aspose’s North American business operations.

Although .NET developers can use Microsoft Office Automation to build applications that access Microsoft Office files, Microsoft Office must be present on all client machines for that to work. To complicate matters further, there is no license model for server-side automation. With Aspose components, developers can create, modify, convert, print and combine Microsoft Office files from within their applications without any reliance on Microsoft Office.

“Rather than using Microsoft Office Automation or spending unnecessary time building your own document converters, you can use our .NET components to get access to and control over the most common business file formats,” said Cooper.

Aspose.Cells for Spreadsheets
With Aspose.Cells for .NET, application users can read, write and manipulate spreadsheets without Microsoft Excel. Aspose.Cells supports all popular Microsoft Office 97–2010 file formats including, XLS, XLSX, SpreadsheetML, CSV, tab-delimited, HTML and others.

Developers can export data, format spreadsheets, import images, create or import charts, and apply complex formulas. They also have complete control over attributes, cell styles and number formats. The included APIs can be used to create and manipulate standard and custom 2D and 3D chart types. Further, drawing objects such as comments, pictures, OLE Objects, shapes and controls can be added to the cells.

Aspose.Words for Document Files
Aspose.Words for .NET allows users to generate, modify, convert, render and print documents without using Microsoft Word. Using Aspose.Words, developers can allow users to open and save DOC, OOXML, RTF, WordprocessingML, HTML, MHTML, TXT and OpenDocument documents from within their applications. They can also allow users to save any document as a PDF, XPS or EPUB file.

With Aspose.Words, entire documents or individual document pages can be converted into a TIFF, PNG, BMP or EMF image. Developers can also render any document page onto a .NET Graphic object, set its size and zoom level to create thumbnails or to display images in a browser.

Aspose.Words also provides an intuitive document object model (DOM) that consists of more than 100 classes. Developers can programmatically create, modify, extract and replace all document elements as well as specify detailed formatting for any document element.

Aspose.Pdf
Aspose.Pdf for .NET allows users to read, write and manipulate PDF documents from within a .NET application without using Adobe Acrobat. It includes PDF compression options, graph support, image functions, extensive hyperlink functionality, extended security controls and custom font handling. Aspose.Pdf also allows tables to be created and manipulated.

Using Aspose.Pdf, developers can exercise fine-grain control over the appearance, behavior and security of PDF documents.

What’s New
Aspose recently added Aspose.Diagram for .NET, which allows users to create diagrams without using Microsoft Visio. It is a high-performance alternative to the Microsoft Vision Object Model.

Using Aspose.Diagram, developers can work with VSD and VDX files in ASP.NET Web applications, Web services and Windows applications. End users can open files and manipulate the elements of a diagram and then export the diagram to native Visio formats or XML.

Aspose is also making .NET and Java components available simultaneously so Java developers no longer have to wait several months for Aspose .NET components to be ported to Java.

How One Customer Simplified Development and Improved User Experience
Project management company Acumen PM is using Aspose.Cells and Aspose.Words to export data from its Fuse metrics analysis and visualization tool to Excel and Word. Originally the development team considered native integration using the Microsoft Office API, but concluded that the approach was impractical based on the subtle differences between Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007. Acumen was also looking for a solution that did not require Microsoft Office to be installed on the desktop.

With Aspose.Cells, it is now possible to save Fuse data as an Excel file, or save multiple Fuse projects as a single Excel file. With Aspose.Words, executive reports can be generated in Fuse and saved as a Word file. Users simply click on the Publish button, and the application output is sent to Excel or Word where it can be manipulated before printing.

According to Dr. Dan Patterson, Acumen’s president and CEO, his company chose Aspose components because they provide broad Microsoft Office and PDF integration. The components are stable and easy to implement, and there are no redistribution fees, he said.

“We allow people to integrate their applications with existing systems, so it’s easy to save application data in Microsoft Office, Flash or PDF formats,” said Aspose’s Cooper. “You can also easily convert spreadsheets and Word documents into PDFs giving users the flexibility they expect.”

For more information about Aspose and its products, visit www.aspose.com.