Syncfusion Essential Grid for Windows Forms General Features
Essential Grid for Windows Forms supports all standard grid control features. In addition, Essential Grid also possesses features such as support for Undo/Redo and OLE Drag-and-drop.

• Alpha Blend and Background - Essential Grid for Windows Forms supports alpha blending and background bitmaps. The alpha value can be applied to individual cells or base styles by changing the interior cell attribute. Users can also switch the grid to a 'transparent' mode that skips all backgrounds in cells. Only the text inside the cells, borders and grid lines will be displayed.
• Banner Cells - Banner cells allow the user to combine the background of neighboring cells to display a background image or gradient brush. Users can load an image from a file on disk and display it in the cell as a gradient among cells or create custom cell backgrounds.
• Cell Styles - Essential Grid for Windows Forms is a Cell-Oriented control and allows you to apply styles at the cell level. Individual cells can be customized in different formats. Every cell in a grid control is associated with a list of attributes that affect the appearance of the grid cells.
• Covered Cell - Multiple cells can be covered to exhibit the behavior of a single cell. This makes it easy to display special items such as titles and bitmaps such that they occupy multiple cells. Covered cells blend seamlessly with Essential Grid's keyboard navigation model. Covered cells can also host any Essential Grid control type. They can be interactively created and cleared by end users.
• Freeze Rows and Columns - Frozen columns and rows stay stationary much like the default headers when the rest of the grid is scrolled. They are very useful when an application requires header rows or columns in addition to default headers. Frozen columns are moved to the far left of the grid and remain there when the grid is scrolled.
• GDI+ - All Essential Grid for Windows Forms drawing code is implemented using GDI+. GDI+ is the C++ based version of its predecessor GDI (Graphics Device Interface).GDI+ is an improved 2D graphics environment with advanced features such as anti-aliased 2D graphics, floating point coordinates, gradient shading, more complex path management, and intrinsic support for modern graphics-file formats like JPEG and PNG. This enables Essential Grid cells to display gradients, rotate text and support transparency. Some grid components use GDI interop, with Essential Grid for Windows Forms, users will find no such "hidden" code. Use of GDI+ in all aspects makes Essential Grid more extensible. Users can easily add code that customizes or extends a drawing selectively without any GDI interop issues.
• Grid Control Style - The appearance of Essential Grid for Windows Forms can be enhanced by applying one of the several styles available.
• Grid List Control and AutoComplete - Essential Grid for Windows Forms can simulate a listbox control. All three listbox modes are supported: One, multi-simple and multi-extended. The listbox can be bound to any collection or ADO.NET table. The grid listbox can be used as the listbox part of a Combo box with auto-complete support. Both the 'Drop-Down with autocomplete support' style and the 'Drop-Down List' style known from regular Combo boxes are supported.
• Hide Rows and Columns - Users can resize a row or column until it disappears and then double click the header border to make it re-appear. Rows and columns can be programmatically hidden using method calls. Interactive hiding of rows and columns is a very user-friendly feature that greatly enhances the usability of grids that have extensive details.
• Keyboard Interface - Essential Grid for Windows Forms provides extensive support for keyboard handling. Arrow keys-move current cell, PageUp/PageDown key-scroll grid by page, F2-activate/deactivate cell, F4+ALT-Drop-Down/Close-UP cell, CTRL + Arrow keys-move to first/last, row/column, SHIFT + Arrow keys-select cell, DELETE key-delete cell, CTRL+X, CTRL+V, CTRL+C, INSERT key and DELETE key support common clipboard operations etc. All keyboard operations can be customized.
• MDI Support - Essential Grid for Windows Forms extends its support to (MDI) Multiple Document Interface by allowing users to work with multiple grid controls at the same time.
• Merged Cells - Merged cells allow users to display adjoining cells with like values as a single cell. The merging is dynamic. If a cell's value changes, the grid will automatically adjust the merged cells.
• Mouse Operation - Essential Grid for Windows Forms mouse and hit test operations are implemented using a special MouseController pattern. This allows easy plug-in of custom mouse operations pertaining to different hit test contexts. As Cursor Moves Over Button-Button Appearance Changes-Users Get Tactile Feedback This architecture fully supports the Windows Forms Framework with events such as MouseHover, MouseLeave and MouseEnter.
• MS Excel Import and Export - The Grid control contents can be exported to MS Excel. Microsoft Excel file contents can also be imported to the Grid control.
• PDF Export - Essential Grid for Windows Forms contents can be exported to a PDF file. It also supports drawing custom header and footer.
• OLE DND and Clipboard - Essential Grid for Windows Forms provides complete clipboard support. Users can Copy or Paste inside the grid and from or to other OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) DND (Drag-and-Drop)-enabled applications that understand text format. OLE DND between two Essential Grid for Windows Forms includes a custom format that allows users to copy or move complete style information including covered cells. Essential Grid for Windows Forms also provides hooks for the easy addition of support for custom data formats.
• Print Support - Essential Grid for Windows Forms provides complete support for printing and print preview. There is a special mode to display the grid in gray scale. This is especially useful when printing a grid using black ink. The gray scale print will exhibit finer discrimination between cells when compared to prints in regular color mode. It also offers options to view the divided layout of a grid into pages at run time.
• Property Grid - Essential Grid for Windows Forms cell properties can be set and displayed using the standard Windows Forms 'Property Grid'. Multiple cells can be formatted at one time just as in Microsoft Excel. Wherever possible, Essential Grid takes advantage of existing framework classes. This ensures a consistent user interface and also reduces the effort required to effectively use the product.
• Record Navigation Bar- A MS Access-like Record Navigation Bar lets users scroll records in a table. The total number of records can also be displayed in the navigation bar next to the current record number.
• Resize Rows and Columns - Columns and rows can be interactively resized. Essential Grid for Windows Forms supports Undo of the Size action. This can be achieved by double-clicking the header borders. Users can also size multiple columns at a time by selecting the required columns and sizing one column from that selection. Resize support for rows and columns is especially useful in light of the excellent support for the Undo/Redo command in Essential Grid for Windows Forms. Users can alter grid layout to suit their needs.
• Serialization - Essential Grid for Windows Forms supports versioned serialization of grid data to binary, xml and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) formats.
• Split Views - The Grid Control view can be split into different sections using the SplitterControl in Essential Studio.
• Virtual Mode - The Grid Control can quickly display huge volumes of data in the virtual mode. The data can be stored in an external data structure and supplied on demand. In virtual mode, users can bind the Grid Control to any external data without having to give it over the data source. The Grid Control can easily support billions of rows without compromising performance. Virtual mode can also be used in combination with a regular grid or a data-bound grid. Users can choose to supply specific cells on-demand whereas other calls can be loaded from the grid internally.
• Zooming Grid - The grid content can be zoomed in and out as required. Options available are percent zooming at grid level and zooming at cell level.
• Grid Selection Modes - Essential Grid for Windows Forms offers different kinds of selection modes such as RowOnly, ColumnOnly, CellOnly and so on.
• Excel-Like Fill Series - Essential Grid for Windows Forms can be enabled with excel like fill series, which will be helpful to manipulate the sequential values, for number, date and time. It has a behavior to choose between copy series and fill series, where as the Copy-Series will copy the number value to other cells and the Fill-Series will fill the sequential numbers or date just like the MS-Excel does.

Essential Grid for Windows Forms supports several cell types, including Header Text, Static, Text Box, Check Box, Numeric Up-Down, Push Button, and Combo Box. Additionally, users may derive more cell types from the classes.

• Button Edit Cell
• Cell Buttons
• Chart Cell
• Check Box
• Color Picker
• Combo Box
• Currency Cells
• Link Label Cell
• Date-Time Picker Cells
• Grid Drop-Down
• Grid in Cells
• Header Text
• In-Place Calendars
• Mask Edit
• Month Calendar
• Numeric Up-Down
• Password Cell
• Picture Box Cell
• Progress Bar Cell
• DropDown Calculator Cell
• Push Button
• Radio-Button Cell
• Rich-Text Cell
• Slider Cell
• Static Text
• UI-Type Editor Cell
• Web-Browser Cell
• XHTML Cell