C# – OCR using MODI Office 2007

Disable DEP for specific applications.

How to Disable DEP for Specific Applications

1. Click the Start button on your Windows computer and choose Computer > System Properties > Advanced System Settings.
2. From the System Properties dialog, select Settings.
3. Select the Data Execution Prevention tab.
4. Select Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select.

Click Add and use the browse feature to browse to the program executable you want to exclude—for example, excel.exe or word.exe.

Depending on your version of Windows, you may need to access the System Properties dialog box by right-clicking This PC or Computer from Windows Explorer.

1. In Windows Explorer, right-click and choose Properties > Advanced System Settings > System Properties.
2. Select Advanced > Performance > Data Execution Prevention.
3. Select Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select.
4. Click Add and use the browse feature to browse to the program executable you want to exclude.

Exclude:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\MODI\11.0\MSPOCRDC.EXE  
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\MODI\11.0\MSPSCAN.EXE  
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\MODI\11.0\MSPVIEW.EXE

Additional information not part of the answer:

To obtain and install MODI on newest versions of Windows see:
"Microsoft Office Document Imaging – Office 2010 to Office 2016"

References:

"Exclude Programs From DEP (Data Execution Prevention)"

"Microsoft Office Document Scanning error"

MODI is part of (free) "Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007".

You can use a library called ExcelLibrary. It's a free, open source library posted on Google Code:

ExcelLibrary

This looks to be a port of the PHP ExcelWriter that you mentioned above. It will not write to the new .xlsx format yet, but they are working on adding that functionality in.

It's very simple, small and easy to use. Plus it has a DataSetHelper that lets you use DataSets and DataTables to easily work with Excel data.

ExcelLibrary seems to still only work for the older Excel format (.xls files), but may be adding support in the future for newer 2007/2010 formats.

You can also use EPPlus, which works only for Excel 2007/2010 format files (.xlsx files). There's also NPOI which works with both.

There are a few known bugs with each library as noted in the comments. In all, EPPlus seems to be the best choice as time goes on. It seems to be more actively updated and documented as well.

Also, as noted by @АртёмЦарионов below, EPPlus has support for Pivot Tables and ExcelLibrary may have some support (Pivot table issue in ExcelLibrary)

Here are a couple links for quick reference:
ExcelLibrary - GNU Lesser GPL
EPPlus - GNU (LGPL) - No longer maintained
EPPlus 5 - Polyform Noncommercial - Starting May 2020
NPOI - Apache License

Here some example code for ExcelLibrary:

Here is an example taking data from a database and creating a workbook from it. Note that the ExcelLibrary code is the single line at the bottom:

//Create the data set and table
DataSet ds = new DataSet("New_DataSet");
DataTable dt = new DataTable("New_DataTable");

//Set the locale for each
ds.Locale = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;
dt.Locale = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;

//Open a DB connection (in this example with OleDB)
OleDbConnection con = new OleDbConnection(dbConnectionString);
con.Open();

//Create a query and fill the data table with the data from the DB
string sql = "SELECT Whatever FROM MyDBTable;";
OleDbCommand cmd = new OleDbCommand(sql, con);
OleDbDataAdapter adptr = new OleDbDataAdapter();

adptr.SelectCommand = cmd;
adptr.Fill(dt);
con.Close();

//Add the table to the data set
ds.Tables.Add(dt);

//Here's the easy part. Create the Excel worksheet from the data set
ExcelLibrary.DataSetHelper.CreateWorkbook("MyExcelFile.xls", ds);

Creating the Excel file is as easy as that. You can also manually create Excel files, but the above functionality is what really impressed me.