Using Aspose.Cells as engine for a Dashboard screen

Hi support


First of all, I want to express my overall satisfaction using the Apose suite. I think you are doing a very good job.

But… There is an area where my project manager is not fully satisfied, and I promised to ask in these forums whether or not we are working “as expected” or we are seing some flaws because we are pushing the limits, or just operating in a small corner where it is hard to get it all correct.

What I have implemented in Aspose is as follows.

We develop a pretty large administrative IT system, in which you (of course) can keep track of various forms of documentation, and where you can do some data analysis. Both the data analysis solution and the documentation can contain/output Excel workbooks.

Within these workbooks our customers can create various Charts or sheets to create a visual overview of “state of the nation”.

We then have a dashboard area in our product as well, where I have implemented some components that can extract these graphs from the Excel workbooks, or convert the entire workbook to PDF, and present these to the end-users.

Basically we deliver the graphs from Excel, without having enduser to actually locate the file and open it in Excel.

All made possible due to various features in the Aspose suite. And almost all of it working, and at pretty speeds (even though we do runtime conversions/extractions).

The problem arises from time to time though, that a customer creates a chart in Excel, where Aspose fails to render it correctly when saved to image (svg or png), The errors when saving to SVG also appears when saving the entire workbook as PDF - expecting you use same functionality behind the scenes here.

What my project manager wants to ask is, whether or not this is a supported workflow, or we should look for some other way of presenting the data to end users.

He thinks there are too many errors in the output images.

What we have done until now is just creating a forum thread for each error, and then you fix it, and then we from time to time apply a now version of our document utilities including Aspose in our main product.

I think what my project manager is looking for is an indication that you expect ALL of the various settings and formatting within the Excel chart domain to work. And when we find minor errors - these are corrected.

From your documentation I have found this: Chart to Image|Documentation
Stating that most is supported - and some not. We are aware of this.

But can you somehow give me an indication of how “complete” you expect your support of the supported chart types are? Do they only get tested for simple scenarios, or do you have fully automated tests of a wide range of combination of settings.

As a developer I would be surpised if you have fully covered all combinations of settings on all of the charts - as I see this as a quite huge matrix of settings.

Sorry for the many words, but it is quite hard to explain what confirmation I am looking for.

When all the above is written - no matter the answer I don’t see us stop using Aspose in general - maybe we will add some other components for the dashboard, but I have implemented quite a few other scenarios/workflows where Aspose is a key player.

Looking forward to you answer.
Best regards
/Anders

An example could be this issue: http://www.aspose.com/community/forums/700962/error-in-pivot-chart-toimage/showthread.aspx#700962



Hi,

Thanks for your posting and considering Aspose.Cells.

As you know Aspose.Cells supports most of the charts and you can take your worksheet and chart images. Also you can save your individual chart into pdf. Reading your posts, we feel your requirements can be fulfilled by Aspose.Cells.

For chart issues, we do support complex charts. You can try creating complex charts manually using Microsoft Excel and then save your excel file into pdf. There you will get the png image of your chart and then check if it is ok or not.

For any problem, you can report to us in this forum, we try to fix user issues mostly in 4 working days but sometimes, we take couple of weeks too if the issues are complex.

SVG images of worksheet and charts are also supported. Mostly SVG issues are reported less because this image format is not used by most of the users. So if you find SVG issues, then please report to us, we are able to fix such issues in due time.

Aspose.Cells is a reliable solution for you. If some issue is broken in newer releases, we take it very seriously and log it as a regression issues and report it to our higher management. So our effort is always to give solid fixes that do not break the existing functionality. Besides, you can always ask us to implement some new feature. We will analyze your request and implement it in future releases if possible.

Please also see the following documentation articles that might be helpful for you.

( Pdf|Documentation )
( Chart to Image|Documentation )
( Convert Excel to Pdf, Image and other formats|Documentation )
( Pdf|Documentation )
( Image|Documentation )