[bob1029]

We are getting pretty crazy with our use of Excel documents these days. With a little bit of OpenXML magic, you can read/write these things from code. I'm not talking about CSV either. I am talking about full-blown XLSX files, where you can control font/color/size/worksheets/et.al. with a few lines of logic.

Once you are able to read & write excel documents with a piece of software, you can do some pretty fucking incredible things.

Imagine being able to click a single button and download a total configuration output for a customer's environment (maybe 20-30 worksheets auto-generated in seconds). You can then email this human readable document to the customer for modifications. You then feed this back into the system to load their adjusted values (there is a diff/check-in report to confirm first).

The reason we and our customers like this approach is because there is a lot of configuration where we need to compare lists of things and slice parts of one thing into another. It makes replicating success absolutely trivial. Being able to style the document is a much bigger benefit than you would probably think at first. CSV is trivial to employ, but it is very constrained on this front. For a developer who is familiar, color & layout doesn't move the needle much. For a customer who has no clue how the back-end works, these things make all the difference in the universe. Things you can't edit are grey background, things you can are green, etc.