Understanding the Spreadsheet Objects

You can customize the appearance of various parts of the Spread component. Roughly speaking, the objects in the Spread Windows Forms component fall into two categories: objects that represent real world things in a spreadsheet, like column, rows, and cells, and objects that are conceptual representations of underlying pieces of the spreadsheet, such as data and a grid.

The real world objects can be accessed through a built-in set of shortcut objects. The shortcut objects help you interact with the Spread Windows Forms component in a way that is probably familiar to you from working with other components or applications. The conceptual objects, the more abstract objects, are referred to as "models." These models are responsible for managing the style information, formatting, and data in the Spread component.

In actuality, the shortcut objects call the model objects. However, the shortcut objects allow you to interact with the Spread Windows Forms component without dealing too much with the underlying object models. If you are new to working with Spread, or are new to developing in an object-oriented environment, you might want to use the shortcut objects at first, as you become familiar with features of Spread Windows Forms. However, intensive use of the shortcut objects can degrade your application’s performance.

The tasks that relate to setting the appearance of objects in the Spread component include:

For information on customizing the appearance using the Spread Designer, refer to the Spread Designer Guide.