What is an alternative to ADO.NET, but elegant way in C# to read Excel files

Posted by Khnle on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Khnle
Published on 2010-06-03T19:20:29Z Indexed on 2010/06/03 19:24 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 212

Filed under:

c#

|

excel

ADO.NET just fails miserably when it's used to read Excel files where a column contains mixed data types. It appears that it tries to determine the data type of a column, and then assume the rest of the entire column is of the same data type. Here are some backgrounds:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2968111/how-to-prevent-ado-net-from-altering-double-values-when-it-reads-from-excel-files

http://blog.lab49.com/archives/196

What is an alternative approach that doesn't require automation, Excel to be co-installed, is simple (since the input excel file will only have one worksheet in each file).

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about c#

.NET WebRequest.PreAuthenticate not quite what it sounds like

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve run into the problem a few times now: How to pre-authenticate .NET WebRequest calls doing an HTTP call to the server – essentially send authentication credentials on the very first request instead of waiting for a server challenge first? At first glance this sound like it should be easy:… >>> More
HttpWebRequest and Ignoring SSL Certificate Errors

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Man I can't believe this. I'm still mucking around with OFX servers and it drives me absolutely crazy how some these servers are just so unbelievably misconfigured. I've recently hit three different 3 major brokerages which fail HTTP validation with bad or corrupt certificates at least according to… >>> More
The dynamic Type in C# Simplifies COM Member Access from Visual FoxPro

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve written quite a bit about Visual FoxPro interoperating with .NET in the past both for ASP.NET interacting with Visual FoxPro COM objects as well as Visual FoxPro calling into .NET code via COM Interop. COM Interop with Visual FoxPro has a number of problems but one of them at least got a lot… >>> More
Dynamic Type to do away with Reflection

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
The dynamic type in C# 4.0 is a welcome addition to the language. One thing I’ve been doing a lot with it is to remove explicit Reflection code that’s often necessary when you ‘dynamically’ need to walk and object hierarchy. In the past I’ve had a number of ReflectionUtils that used string based expressions… >>> More
Finding a Relative Path in .NET

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Here’s a nice and simple path utility that I’ve needed in a number of applications: I need to find a relative path based on a base path. So if I’m working in a folder called c:\temp\templates\ and I want to find a relative path for c:\temp\templates\subdir\test.txt I want to receive back subdir\test… >>> More

Related posts about excel

Excel error "This workbook contains Excel 4.0 macros or Excel 5.0 modules"

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I have a workbook that was protected via the Protect Workbook feature. It was sent to someone else to modify. When they sent it back, it was unprotected and when I try to reprotect it I get this error, "This workbook contains Excel 4.0 macros or Excel 5.0 modules. If you would like to… >>> More
Open excel 2007 excel files and save as 97-2003 formats in VBA

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have a weird situation where I have a set of excel files, all having the extension .xls., in a directory where I can open all of them just fine in Excel 2007. The odd thing is that I cannot open them in Excel 2003, on the same machine, without opening the file first in 2007 and going and saving… >>> More
Creating Excel or Excel compatible Spreadsheets on the server side in C#

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I'd like to make server-side excel compatible spreadsheets that maybe use OpenXML or a structured data format. I've used Office Interop before to generate Excel spreadsheets, but those apps run on a PC that has office installed. For this web project I'm building, the server doesn't have office installed… >>> More
vba access values from excel workbook from another excel workbook

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Any ideas why this code will not work? Workbooks.Open Filename:="C:\a.xls" Workbooks("a.xls").Activate Worksheets("b").Select Dim OutputArray(10, 10) OutputArray(1, 1) = Workbooks("c.xls").Worksheets("worksheet_otherthan_default").Select.Range(A1).Value I'm trying to run a macro in one file (unnamed… >>> More
Excel workbook event order and usage when closing Excel

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Given the following workbook events: BeforeClose BeforeSave Please tell me: - The firing order in the case of multiple workbooks alreay opened (wb1, wb2 and wb3 are opened in this order) and the user closes Excel. You can assume all 3 needs saving. - What happen if user cancels one of the saving… >>> More