You can treat an xls file as a database table (the workbook is the database and the worksheet is the table)
and write to it using the classes in System.Data.Oledb. The database connectionstring to use can be found at
http://www.connectionstrings.com/excel[
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In your case, the simplest solution might be just to write your data as text, one item per line, and give the output file a .csv extension. Opening the text file in excel will automatically convert it , then you can "save as" xls or xlsx.