Displaying Excel Documents

The ImGearExcelBookDocument and ImGearExcelSheetDocument objects can be created and processed in any thread with any apartment state: STA or MTA. If they also need to be displayed, then there are some concepts which should be taken into account:

• In WPF display scale mode the calling thread must use the STA apartment state, which is a requirement of Windows Presentation Foundation. ImageGear will create a WPF Canvas in the context of this calling thread to render the document pages for display.
• In Native display scale mode, which is the default for ImageGear, there are no restrictions for displaying Excel pages in a multithreaded environment.

Additional Information

The following topics are also covered in this section:

• Walkthrough: Loading Excel Documents
• SpreadsheetML Groups supported by the ImageGear Office Assembly

Below are the groups of the Open XML SpreadsheetML, which ImageGear supports (read only):

• Workbook
• Worksheets
• Shared String Table
• Styles

At a high level, the following SpreadsheetML features are not currently supported.

Excel files containing these features can still be loaded by ImageGear. However, the unsupported content will be ignored.

• Formulas (The last cached value will be displayed, if available)
• Table Definitions
• Pivot Tables
• Query Tables
• Chartsheets
• Dialogsheets
• External Data Connections
• Supplementary Data Connections
• Custom XML Mappings

More information can be found about all of the above SpreadsheetML features in the ECMA-376 Specification.