Could someone help me read a simple excel worksheet in c# app? I'd like to be able to iterate each row and have a handle on each of the columns.
Thanks,
rod.
This one is the easiest method I have found:
Create Excel (.XLS and .XLSX) file from C#
The general method is to use Excel COM Interop. A quick google will find plenty of tutorials. Here's one for creating a sheet - it should point you in the direction (reading is pretty much the same).
An alternative method is to use ADO.Net. This is only really viable if your Excel sheet is well formed as a table ( ie. Database), but is easier than the interop approach.
Here is a sample using OLEDB
http://www.techiesweb.net/2009/12/reading-records-excel-file-insert-database-aspnet/
If you are going to open Excel 2007 or 2010 workbook (ooxml format), you can download Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office (which doesn't require you to have MS office installed).
While Excel COM Interop works, it requires Excel to be installed on the client machine. If that isn't an issue then all good, but if it is you might consider looking at the Aspose.Cells library (no affiliation, just used them before). They're simple and powerful, although do carry a commercial license cost.
I've used ADO.NET and Jet in the past. Be warned that if you have columns that aren't obviously of one type you will see weird things happen. Jet tries to assign a datatype to a column based on the first several vales. The nice thing is that you can query the spreadsheet like it is a table.
Related
I'm currently busy with a task that involves both manipulating data in an excising excel document as well as the sheet itself.
In the past I've always used OleDbConnection and OleDbCommand to work with excel, but I've been reading about something called a Workbook and I'm not sure which way I should go about this.
Some examples of what I need to do include-
Inserting a new column
Deleting old columns
Setting a cell a certain colour depending on it's contents
Looking for duplicates and deleting them.
In your option which way would be the most efficient way to go about this.
Thanks
Best way would be to go with excel interop if you don't want to use any third party library.
Interop works and any action can be performed which you have mentioned in your question.
Refer this link for more info: http://csharp.net-informations.com/excel/csharp-excel-tutorial.htm
PS: above link is for c# and for interop to work ms excel must be installed on the system, this can be implemented in vb.net as well.
Hope this helps.
I have used Visual Studio Tools for Office, you will have workbooks, worksheets, columns, ranges, etc. Easy to manipulate using C#.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb608603.aspx
Install this package into your project Further no need to install Excel also this is fast mothod https://www.nuget.org/packages/ExcelDataReader/
I'm writing a program that reads a text file, extracts information, and outputs it to a template Excel spreadsheet that already exists.
I've managed to do this on my computer using the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel reference and its related methods, and it works fine. I have Excel 2010. However the computers that this program will be used on mostly have either Excel 2000 or Excel 2003, and it won't work on them.
Does anyone know a way to make a program target all versions of Excel from 2000 upwards?
Cheers,
Greg
If your needs are simple and you don't have $900 for Aspose.Cells to throw around, you can do any of the following:
Use NPOI to read, inject data into, and export your template.
Create a basic HTML file with a table and just named it *.xls. You can save your template in Excel as HTML and replace bits and pieces to insert your data.
Create an XML file using Office 2002/2003 XML format, it's pretty straightforward (caveat: can't be read in Excel 2000). As above, you can save your template in XML Spreadsheet format, read it in, and do some simple stuff to inject your data.
You really need to target 2000 or under. 2010 and 2003 will open a 2000 format document whereas 2000 will not open a 2010 document. Office has a single format for 97-2000 and that's what you need to create to make everybody happy.
Interop depends on the version you have installed and I personally have dodged using interop due to its "unmanaged" nature (and it seems to love file locks).
If you want hassle free and extremely fast/powerful creation of Excel documents, you really can not do better than Aspose.Cells in my opinion.
Find it here.
What is the best way/library to read Excel 2003 and 2007 files using C#? I need to do some heavy parsing.
Do you need to parse the file, or deal with the contents?
For parsing the file, you'd better hope it's in Open Office XML format, because the previous binary version is not documented at all.
If you just need to deal with the contents, use the Office Interop libraries.
You can try SmartXLS for .Net,it support most features of excel(cell formatting,Charts,formulas,pivot tables etc),and can read/write both the excel97-2003 xls format and the excel2007 openxml format.
I would start by trying to use ADO.NET.
If that doesn't work, I used xlsio by Syncfusion.
If the data is in some kind of table format I'd suggest to try using OleDbConnection and treating the Excel sheet as another data connection. Otherwise Interop is ok if it's not on a server or anything like that.
You can use the MS Office interop assemblies (see here) to access Excel files from .NET applications.
There are a number of 3rd party tools you can use. I would avoid using the Interop libraries as they can be pretty slow. I have used Aspose.Cells before and it works pretty well. It does cost some money though.
This question already has answers here:
How do I create an Excel (.XLS and .XLSX) file in C# without installing Microsoft Office?
(47 answers)
Closed 4 years ago.
I am writing a program that generates excel reports, currently using the Microsoft.Interop.Excel reference. My dev computer has Excel on it, but the end user may or may not have Office installed. Will this tool fail if Office isn't installed on the end users computer, or is this interop service separate from the actual application?
If you're interested in making .xlsx (Office 2007 and beyond) files, you're in luck. Office 2007+ uses OpenXML which for lack of a more apt description is XML files inside of a zip named .xlsx
Take an excel file (2007+) and rename it to .zip, you can open it up and take a look. If you're using .NET 3.5 you can use the System.IO.Packaging library to manipulate the relationships & zipfile itself, and linq to xml to play with the xml (or just DOM if you're more comfortable).
Otherwise id reccomend DotNetZip, a powerfull library for manipulation of zipfiles.
OpenXMLDeveloper has lots of resources about OpenXML and you can find more there.
If you want .xls (2003 and below) you're going to have to look into 3rd party libraries or perhaps learn the file format yourself to achieve this without excel installed.
Unless you have Excel installed on the Server/PC or use an external tool (which is possible without using Excel Interop, see Create Excel (.XLS and .XLSX) file from C#), it will fail. Using the interop requires Excel to be installed.
Try EPPlus if you use Excel 2007. Supports ranges, cellstyling, charts, shapes, pictures and a lot of other stuff
There are a handful of options:
NPOI - Which is free and open
source.
Aspose - Is definitely
not free but robust.
Spreadsheet
ML - Basically XML for creating spreadsheets.
Using the Interop will require that the Excel be installed on the machine from which it is running. In a server side solution, this will be awful. Instead, you should use a tool like the ones above that lets you build an Excel file without Excel being installed.
If the user does not have Excel but has a tool that will read Excel (like Open Office), then obviously they will be able to open it. Microsoft has a free Excel viewer available for those users that do not have Excel.
An interop calls something else, it's an interoperability assembly, so you're inter-operating with something...in this case Excel, the actual installed Excel.
In this case yes, it will fail to run because it depends on excel, you're just calling excel functions. If they don't have it installed...out of luck.
There are methods to generate without Excel, provided the 2007 file format is ok, here's a few:
http://excelpackage.codeplex.com/
http://simpleooxml.codeplex.com/
as I said though, this is the 2007 format, normally if anything, that's the deal-breaker.
Use OleDB, you can create, read, and edit excel files pretty easily. Read the MSDN docs for more info:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa288452(VS.71).aspx
I've used OleDB to read from excel files and I know you can create them, but I haven't done it firsthand.
You could use the ExcelStorage Class of the FileHelpers library, it's very easy and simple... you will need Excel 2000 or later installed on the machine.
The FileHelpers is a free and easy to
use .NET library to import/export
data from fixed length or delimited
records in files, strings or streams.
I want to know what is the best practice to create a Excel 2007 Workbook using C#, with its datasource being a raw flat file or a table in database.
You can use
"Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office"
It's more comfortable than harcore manually hacking OpenXML spec. There are .NET strongly typed wrapper classes so it's not hard to create a simple sheet. You don't need any interop and msoffice installed and it's safe for server soluitions - there are only a few dlls which you can ship in your solution.
I did mail-merge solution and it wasn't so scary.
But as always, when it's possible, I'm prefering plain csv format.
I personally like creating CSV's, which can be opened directly in Excel. It's a lot less work than trying to hack the Office Open XML specification, and you don't need COM interop to Excel (which requires a copy of Excel to work).
You can use the Office Primary Interop Assemblies to completely automate Excel 2007, and create the workbook from within C#.
This gives you the most control, as you have complete control over how you map from DB or flat file -> Excel workbook/worksheet.
I am using
http://www.leniel.net/2009/07/creating-excel-spreadsheets-xls-xlsx-c.html
for creating excel . Seems good so far.