The Clear Office Spreadsheet is useful in these scenarios:
Generating Excel Reports
For .NET developers who need to generate reports in the Microsoft Excel format, Clear Office Spreadsheet provides an ideal platform. While one can use Microsoft Excel from .NET, this solution involves COM out of proc interop which is slow, cumbersome and unstable. Because Clear Office is a set a native .NET assemblies, it avoids many problems associated with COM interop. Unlike other Excel IO products, Clear Office Spreadsheet understands everything about your spreadsheet. For example, you can enter a formula and calculate the value of a cell.
Importing Excel Data
A consulting company receives expense reports from employees in the field. In order to import the data automatically, the company hires a consultant to write a .NET app which reads incoming Excel files and imports the data to the central accounting database. In addition, the application is smart enough to set the background of cells to yellow each time there is a missing number or a problem. If so, the Excel document is sent back to the trainer in order to get the missing data. Otherwise, expense reports are then stored to a central database. The accountant can query any expense reports directly from the database and visualize it.
Custom Spreadsheet Applications
Financial knowledge workers appreciate the flexibility of Excel to do their job. However, Microsoft Office does not integrate well with .NET. In addition, users might want to add feature to the application - maybe adding real time data, sharing data with other user, etc. While Excel is a great application, it was not meant to be a development platform . Because Clear Office is offered as a set of components, it provides much higher flexibility as application platform. For example, the custom Clear Office spreadsheet applications might validate the value of certain cells, execute complex calculations, connect to a database in the background, use WCF to exchange data with other ClearOffice custom spreadsheet applications without having to use dirty tricks (such as "save a command to batch file, execute the batch file, reimport data"). Everything is .NET based.
Clear Office Ribbon
A developer needs a ribbon as a toolbar/menu replacement in his .NET application. Unlike other ribbon products, the Clear Office ribbon is part of an actual Office application. Unlike components from competitors, the Clear Office ribbon does not reinvent the wheel. For example, it does not define any unnecessary new controls - there is no "RibbonButton", "RibbonCheckBox", etc. Instead, the clear office ribbon uses standard controls (WPF button, menu items, check boxes etc) and defines a set of attached properties (OfficeElement.ControlState, OfficeElement.Icon, etc) to express the visual appearance and resize behavior. All the magic is implemented using styles and control templates.
Grid Replacement
While some applications might use a traditional grid, some developers might prefer a "Excel like" grid. Traditional grids are very different from Excel grids. Obviously, Excel grids work very well at opening and saving spreadsheet documents. In addition, Excel grids support auto fill, ranges, formulas, cell merging, comments, etc. Hosting a Microsoft Excel grid in a .NET application is somewhat cumbersome (COM) and fragile (if Excel is not properly installed, or the wrong version is installed, it won't work). Having a native Spreadsheet grid removes this pain. In addition, it leverages the full power of WPF (rotation, transparency, animation).