Overview

HotXLS Excel Read/Write Library is a high-performance Excel read-write component for Delphi & C++Builder It can create new Excel spreadsheets and read or modify existing XLS and XLSX workbooks without requiring Microsoft Excel or Office to be installed on the machine HotXLS is written entirely in Object Pascal. It reads and writes Excel files directly at the binary and OOXML level, so there is no COM/OLE automation overhead and no dependency on Office being licensed or present. HotXLS supports Delphi and C++Builder XE5 through 13 Florence Classic XLS color formatting intentionally remains palette-based. See Classic XLS color model for the ThemeColor / TintAndShade decision

lxHandle	Primary facade for the Excel 97–2003 BIFF8 format (.xls), plus HTML, RTF, CSV, and TSV export. All existing user code continues to use this unit unchanged. Entry points: TXLSWorkbook, TXLSWorksheet, IXLSWorkbook, IXLSRange
lxHandleX	Primary facade for the Excel 2007+ OOXML format (.xlsx) and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods) read/write. Provides its own workbook and worksheet types so XLSX-specific behavior is not retrofitted onto the BIFF code path. Entry points: TXLSXWorkbook, TXLSXWorksheet, TXLSXCell

Classic XLS (lxHandle)

uses lxHandle;

var
  Book: IXLSWorkbook;
  ws:   TXLSWorksheet;
begin
  Book := TXLSWorkbook.Create;
  // Add a worksheet and give it a name
  ws := Book.Sheets.Add;
  ws.Name := 'Sheet1';

  // Write values to cells using A1 notation
  ws.Range['A1'].Value := 'Hello';
  ws.Range['B1'].Value := 42;
  ws.Range['C1'].Formula := '=B1*2';

  // Apply basic formatting
  ws.Range['A1'].Font.Bold := True;
  ws.Range['A1'].Interior.Color := clYellow;

  Book.SaveAs('output.xls');
end;

XLSX (lxHandleX)

uses lxHandleX;

var
  Book: TXLSXWorkbook;
  ws:   TXLSXWorksheet;
  cell: TXLSXCell;
begin
  Book := TXLSXWorkbook.Create;
  try
    ws := Book.Sheets.Add('Sheet1');

    // Write a string and a numeric value
    ws.Cells[1, 1].Value := 'Product';
    ws.Cells[1, 2].Value := 'Price';
    ws.Cells[2, 1].Value := 'Widget';
    ws.Cells[2, 2].Value := 9.99;

    // Apply a currency number format
    cell := ws.Cells[2, 2];
    cell.NumberFormat := '$#,##0.00';

    Book.SaveAs('output.xlsx');
  finally
    Book.Free;
  end;
end;

File I/O and Stream Support

Cell Values and Formulas

• Text functions (LEFT, MID, TRIM, SUBSTITUTE, …)
• Date and workday functions (DATE, NETWORKDAYS, WORKDAY, …)
• Engineering and base-conversion functions (BIN2DEC, HEX2DEC, …)
• Bitwise functions (BITAND, BITOR, BITXOR, …)
• Statistical and aggregate functions (AVERAGE, SUMIF, COUNTIFS, …)
• Math functions (ROUND, MOD, POWER, …)

Cell Formatting

• Fonts — name, size, color (RGB or theme color + tint), bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, shadow, and outline
• Alignment — horizontal and vertical alignment, text orientation (angle), indent level, wrap text, shrink-to-fit, and reading order (RTL/LTR)
• Borders — all four edges and diagonals, line style, weight, and RGB / theme color
• Interior (fill) — solid fill, pattern fills, foreground and background colors including theme color with TintAndShade
• Number formats — built-in and custom format strings for date, time, currency, percentage, and scientific notation
• Comments / annotations — add, read, and style cell comments

Range Operations

• Merge and unmerge cells; access the merged area of any cell
• Copy, move, insert, and delete ranges, with shift direction control
• Group and ungroup rows or columns for outline/collapse views
• AutoFit row height and column width to cell content
• Apply built-in named cell styles (ApplyBuiltinStyle)
• Multi-area selections (TXLSWorksheet.SelectAreas)
• ForEachCell iteration callback for batch cell processing

Worksheet Features

• Sheet name, tab color, visibility (hidden / very-hidden), and index-based navigation
• Sheet protection with per-permission granularity; workbook-level protection
• Freeze panes, split panes, and scroll position
• AutoFilter ranges with criteria; list data validation rules
• Conditional formatting: color scales (2 and 3 color), data bars, and icon sets
• Find-text and replace-text across a worksheet
• View options: gridline color, display formula mode, display zeros, display headings, display right-to-left, display outline symbols, and zoom level
• Structured tables (TXLSTable / TXLSXTable): add, access, and style Excel tables with header rows and banded rows
• Charts: add chart sheets and embedded charts via TXLSWorksheetsAddChartSheet and TXLSXChart

Hyperlinks and Named Ranges

Images and Shapes

Page Setup and Printing

• Paper size (A4, Letter, Legal, and many others; see PaperSize)
• Orientation (portrait / landscape), margins, center horizontally / vertically
• Header and footer strings with Excel formatting codes (bold, italic, page number, date, etc.; see Header/Footer formatting codes)
• Manual horizontal and vertical page breaks
• Fit-to-pages scaling; zoom percentage; print area; print titles (repeat rows / columns)
• Draft quality; black-and-white; print gridlines; print headings; print notes

Export Formats

• HTML — full document or an inline table fragment for preview or email workflows; controllable via TXLSHTMLExport and TXLSXHtmlExportOptions
• RTF — rich text for word-processor import
• CSV — comma-separated values with configurable delimiter and encoding
• TSV — tab-separated values
• ODS — OpenDocument Spreadsheet via the lxHandleX facade

Database and Grid Export

VBA Project Preservation

Unicode and International Text

Pivot Tables (Classic XLS)

No Office dependency	Reads and writes XLS and XLSX files directly at the binary level. Microsoft Excel or Office does not need to be installed, licensed, or running. This eliminates COM/OLE automation overhead, avoids threading restrictions imposed by Office interop, and allows HotXLS to be used in server-side and service contexts where a desktop Office installation is impractical
High performance	The BIFF8 and OOXML parsers are written in native Object Pascal with no intermediate XML DOM allocation for the hot path. Large workbooks with hundreds of thousands of rows can be read and written with low peak memory. Shared-string deduplication and shared-formula compression are applied automatically to keep file sizes small
OLE migration path	The classic-facade API surface (workbook, worksheet, range, font, borders, interior, page setup) closely mirrors the Excel object model familiar from OLE Automation. This makes migrating existing OLE-based projects straightforward: replace the COM calls with HotXLS calls, remove the Office dependency, and gain native performance
Dual-facade design	Legacy XLS code continues to compile and run unchanged against lxHandle while new XLSX code uses the richer lxHandleX facade. Migrating one file format at a time is safe and incremental
Formula engine included	A built-in multi-pass calculation engine handles the most common worksheet functions without requiring Excel to recalculate on open. Custom functions are handled through the OnUserFunction callback
Easy to use	Drop-in Delphi components (TDataToXLS, TGridToXLS) require no code for common export tasks. The fluent range API supports A1 notation, R1C1 notation, and zero-based row/column indexing
Thread-safe file I/O	Because there is no shared Office process, multiple TXLSXWorkbook instances can be created and saved concurrently on independent threads without synchronization, making HotXLS suitable for multi-threaded report generation servers

Delphi	XE5, XE6, XE7, XE8, 10 Seattle, 10.1 Berlin, 10.2 Tokyo, 10.3 Rio, 10.4 Sydney, 11 Alexandria, 12 Athens, 13 Florence
C++Builder	XE5, XE6, XE7, XE8, 10 Seattle, 10.1 Berlin, 10.2 Tokyo, 10.3 Rio, 10.4 Sydney, 11 Alexandria, 12 Athens, 13 Florence
Target platforms	Windows 32-bit and 64-bit
Excel file formats	XLS (BIFF8, Excel 97–2003), XLSX (OOXML, Excel 2007+), ODS (OpenDocument 1.2)
Export-only formats	HTML, RTF, CSV, TSV

• XLSX Facade Overview (lxHandleX) — full class hierarchy and XLSX/ODS-specific API members
• API Tour Demo — first demo to run when learning HotXLS from scratch
• IXLSWorkbook — classic XLS workbook interface reference
• TXLSWorksheet — classic XLS worksheet class reference
• IXLSRange — range interface: cell access, formatting, and operations
• TXLSXWorkbook — XLSX workbook class reference
• TXLSXWorksheet — XLSX worksheet class reference
• TGridToXLS — drop-in DBGrid-to-Excel export component
• TDataToXLS — drop-in dataset-to-Excel export component
• OnUserFunction callback — custom worksheet function extension point
• Classic XLS color model — palette-based color and theme color design rationale
• Classic XLS additional API members — calculation properties, document properties, pivot tables, and more
• Examples — sample projects overview
• Purchase Order Sample — full-featured XLS creation example with source code