Use Excel Interop to grab image of Excel chart without writing to disk or using the clipboard

Question

The interface to the chart object in Excel only allows access to the image representing the chart through two methods:

• export, which saves the image to a file<

Answer 1

One option that may work would be to use a memory mapped file. Of course disk can be involved there, so you should profile the standard export to disk vs. using a memory mapped file (assuming the slowness of disk i/o is your only concern with that approach).

They don't have out of the box support in .Net yet, but there likely plenty of implementations out there.