<p>Our product has the requirement of exporting its native format (essentially an XML file) to Excel for viewing/editing. However, what this entails is having a dependency on Excel (or Office) itself for our product build - something that we do not want. </p>

<p>What we have done is export the data from our native format to a csv file which can be opened in Excel. If user selects an option to open the generated report as well, we (try to) launch Excel application to open it (ofcourse it requires Excel to be already present on the client system).</p>

<p>The data for most part is flat list of records.</p>

<p>Is there a better format (or even a better way) to handle this requirement? This is a common requirement for many products - how do you handle this?</p>

I'm using
ExcelPackage
to create spreadsheets in one of my side projects.  Works pretty good, but (at least the version I'm using) its a bit limited when it comes to styling and calculations.
ExcelPackage lets you create OOXML docs (.xslx files) that are natively compat with 2k7, but you can
download a plugin
for previous versions of Office from MS.