Starting in our 18.1 Ultimate UI for Windows Forms release, we aimed to provide the most complete Microsoft Excel & Spreadsheet solution for .NET application development. Now, in our 19.1 release, we continue to achieve that goal by bringing the power of Excel Charting directly into your WIndows Forms applications.

Let’s take a look at what we’re shipping in Infragistics Ultimate for Windows Forms 19.1.

Excel Library

As you know, we have been putting a lot of effort into our Excel Library and Spreadsheet control for a few releases now.  Our customers have let us know just how important these are to their day-to-day business. Due to this demand, we have doubled down on our efforts and are working towards finishing out our Excel Charting feature set. The Excel Library now has the ability to create combination charts. What is a combination chart? Well… it’s quite simple. It’s a single chart that has two or more chart types within it.

In Excel, you would add a combination chart as follows:

You can now do the same thing using our Excel Library with just a few lines of code.

Open the newly created document in Microsoft Excel, and BOOM! You have your combination chart.

Spreadsheet

You have been able to create charts using the Infragistics Excel Library since 18.2. It only makes sense that our goal for the Spreadsheet control in 19.1 was to render those amazing charts. I am happy to announce that you can consider it done! As of 19.1, you can now load any Excel document containing a chart and we will render it.

Rendering charts is a breeze!  Let’s take the combination chart we created using the Excel Library earlier in this post.  We’ll load that same document using our brand new Spreadsheet Chart Adapter.

Start by adding a reference to the Infragistics4.Win.UltraWinSpreadsheet.ChartAdapter.v19.1.dll to your existing Windows Forms application.

Now, modify your code and provide a new SpreadsheetChartAdpater as follows:

Add some code to load your Excel document:

Run your app, load a document, and BOOM! Charts!

Do you know what the best part is? If you make a change to the data, the chart will update it’s rendering to reflect the changes in data. How freaking cool is that!

Let’s Wrap this Baby Up!

As I always like to point out, if you have ideas about new features we should bring to our controls, important issues we need to fix, or even brand new controls you’d like us to introduce, please let us know by posting them on our Product Ideas website.  Follow and engage with us on Twitter via @infragistics. You can also follow and contact me directly on Twitter at @brianlagunas.  Also, make sure to connect with our various teams via our Community Forums where you can interact with Infragistics engineers and other customers. 

If you are not using our Windows Forms controls yet, remember that a free evaluation download is only a click away.

Lastly, when you do build something cool with our controls, please make sure to let me know.