HotXLS Docs

Native Excel · Delphi & C++Builder · no Excel / Office / COM

Generate, read, style and export real spreadsheets entirely inside your own process

HotXLS is a native Object Pascal spreadsheet library that reads, writes, modifies, styles, calculates and exports Excel workbooks at the binary / OOXML level — with no Microsoft Excel, no Office installation, no COM / OLE automation, no external DLL, and no runtime royalties

Read the Overview See What's New (2.92.0)

Nine reasons teams pick HotXLS over Office automation

Each point is a delivered capability you can verify in the API reference and demos — not a roadmap item

No Excel / Office / COM dependency

Build workbooks straight inside your Delphi or C++Builder process. Works on desktop apps, services, batch jobs, installers and server utilities where Office automation is brittle, slow, or simply unavailable

Designed for unattended / server-side use

Pure native Pascal · no DLL · no royalties

Written entirely in Delphi, no DLLs and no intermediate XML DOM allocation on the hot path. Ship to production with developer licenses only — no per-copy runtime fees

69 source units · single in-process engine

Six formats, one library

Read/write XLS (BIFF8), XLSX (OOXML) and ODS (OpenDocument 1.2); export to CSV, TSV, HTML and RTF. CSV/TSV import auto-sniffs separators, detects BOM and infers value types

Entry points TXLSWorkbook & TXLSXWorkbook

Built-in formula calculation engine

Formulas are evaluated by HotXLS itself — no need for Excel to recalc on open. Covers text, date/workday, base-conversion, bitwise, statistical and math families; add your own via OnUserFunction / OnUserFunctionEx

Step-by-step trace via TXLSFormulaTracer

AES-NI accelerated encryption

Excel-compatible AES-encrypted XLSX save with hardware AES-NI acceleration and a software fallback (SaveAsEncrypted); classic XLS keeps BIFF8 RC4 password protection via EncryptionPassword

Identical ciphertext on either path

Near-constant-memory streaming

TXLSDirectReader scans cells one-by-one with per-cell/per-sheet events and early abort; TXLSDirectWriter emits each worksheet straight into the package as rows arrive. Handle very large workbooks without loading them whole

Shared-string dedup + shared-formula compression keep files small

Thread-safe file I/O

Multiple TXLSXWorkbook instances run concurrently on independent threads with no synchronization — ideal for multi-threaded report servers generating many workbooks at once

Suitable for high-throughput service backends

Dual-facade architecture

Legacy code keeps working on the classic lxHandle facade (XLS + HTML/RTF/CSV/TSV), while lxHandleX grows XLSX/ODS independently — migrate incrementally without a big-bang rewrite

API mirrors the Excel OLE object model — drop-in for COM migration

Drop-in components & rich Excel objects

TDataToXLS (dataset export) and TGridToXLS (DBGrid export) need no code for common tasks; optional DevExpress cxGrid export. Plus charts, pivot tables, conditional formatting, data validation, AutoFilter, tables, images and VBA round-trip

50 Delphi + 27 C++Builder demo projects

The evidence, not just claims

6formats: XLS, XLSX, ODS, CSV/TSV, HTML, RTF
12RAD Studio versions: XE5 → 13.1 Florence
466API reference & guide topics
35localized documentation languages

Who HotXLS is built for

Server-side report generation

High-volume, multi-threaded workbook production on services where Excel/Office can't be installed — thread-safe, no UI, near-constant memory

Office-automation refugees

Replacing brittle, slow COM/OLE automation with a native in-process engine that mirrors the Excel object model — same calls, no Office, real performance

Data export & BI

One-line dataset / DBGrid / DevExpress cxGrid export to styled, formula-aware workbooks that open cleanly in any spreadsheet app

Finance & compliance

AES-encrypted XLSX delivery, BIFF8 RC4 legacy support, and high-fidelity round-trip preserving Excel-authored metadata and theme colors

Multi-language data

Unicode-native reads/writes for CJK, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai with correct bidirectional / reading-order handling

Single-file deployment

Desktop & embedded tools that must ship as one executable with no external dependencies or install footprint

Write a styled workbook in a few lines

No Excel, no COM, no temporary XML files on disk — workbooks are built directly in memory

uses lxHandleX;

var
  WB: TXLSXWorkbook;
  WS: TXLSXWorksheet;
begin
  WB := TXLSXWorkbook.Create;
  try
    WS := WB.AddWorksheet('Sales');
    WS.Cells[0, 0].AsString := 'Region';
    WS.Cells[0, 1].AsString := 'Total';
    WS.Cells[1, 1].AsFormula := '=SUM(B2:B100)';
    WS.ApplyAutoFilter('A1:B100');
    WB.SaveAsEncrypted('sales.xlsx', 'owner-pwd');
  finally
    WB.Free;
  end;
end;

Next steps

Start with the full Overview and the Examples, browse every class in the Contents, or jump to the latest Release Notes (currently 2.92.0)