recommend a tutorial to read Excel file in C#

Question

Hello everyone,

I have experience in C# but limited experience in using C# to read content from Excel. My task is very simple, just read each column of each row of an Excel document and retrieve their values.

Any good tutorials or samples for a beginner? I am using VSTS 2008 + C# + .Net 3.5.

I am working with Excel 2007.

thanks in advance, George

Answer 1

Check out this link.

Based on your description it is enough, but if you need to create an Add-in I would just look at VSTO. just google/bing it, rather easy :)

Answer 2

If you just need to read an excel document I'll recommend this blog post by David Hayden. I used it as a primer when I moved from excel automation to ADO.NET

Answer 3

Format of Excel 2007 files isn't straigtforward. Getting a text value of a cell using Open XML Format SDK 2.0 requires a lot of actions. If you're not going to use third party libraries, which don't know about, you have to get deeply into this SDK. There are tutorials, but I dont't know easy solution even for your simple task.

Answer 4

SpreadsheetGear for .NET will do it. Here is a simple example in a C# console application:

using System;
using SpreadsheetGear;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            // Load Book.xlsx.
            IWorkbook workbook = Factory.GetWorkbook(@"c:\Book.xlsx");
            // Write the address and formatted text value of each
            // cell to the console.
            foreach (IRange cell in workbook.Worksheets[0].UsedRange)
                Console.WriteLine("{0}='{1}'", cell.Address, cell.Text);
        }
    }
}

You can download a free trial here and try it yourself.

Disclaimer: I own SpreadsheetGear LLC