How to insert programmatically a new line in an Excel cell in C#?

Question

I'm using the Aspose library to create an Excel document. Somewhere in some cell I need to insert a new line between two parts of the text.

I tried "\r\n" but it doesn't work, just displays two square symbols in cell. I can however press Alt+Enter to create a new line in that same cell.

How do I insert a new line programmatically?

Answer 1

You need to insert the character code that Excel uses, which IIRC is 10 (ten).

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EDIT: OK, here's some code. Note that I was able to confirm that the character-code used is indeed 10, by creating a cell containing:

A

B

...and then selecting it and executing this in the VBA immediate window:

?Asc(Mid(Activecell.Value,2,1))

So, the code you need to insert that value into another cell in VBA would be:

ActiveCell.Value = "A" & vbLf & "B"

(since vbLf is character code 10).

I know you're using C# but I find it's much easier to figure out what to do if you first do it in VBA, since you can try it out "interactively" without having to compile anything. Whatever you do in C# is just replicating what you do in VBA so there's rarely any difference. (Remember that the C# interop stuff is just using the same underlying COM libraries as VBA).

Anyway, the C# for this would be:

oCell.Value = "A\nB";

Spot the difference :-)

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EDIT 2: Aaaargh! I just re-read the post and saw that you're using the Aspose library. Sorry, in that case I've no idea.

Answer 2

Internally Excel uses U+000D U+000A (CR+LF, \r\n) for a line break, at least in its XML representation. I also couldn't find the value directly in a cell. It was migrated to another XML file containing shared strings. Maybe cells that contain line breaks are handled differently by the file format and your library doesn't know about this.

Answer 3

Have you tried "\n" I guess, it should work.

Answer 4

SpreadsheetGear for .NET does it this way:

        IWorkbook workbook = Factory.GetWorkbook();
        IRange a1 = workbook.Worksheets[0].Cells["A1"];
        a1.Value = "Hello\r\nWorld!";
        a1.WrapText = true;
        workbook.SaveAs(@"c:\HelloWorld.xlsx", FileFormat.OpenXMLWorkbook);

Note the "WrapText = true" - Excel will not wrap the text without this. I would assume that Aspose has similar APIs.

Disclaimer: I own SpreadsheetGear LLC

Answer 5

From the Aspose Cells forums: How to use new line char with in a cell?

After you supply text you should set the cell's IsTextWrapped style to true

worksheet.Cells[0, 0].Style.IsTextWrapped = true;

Answer 6

"\n" works fine. If the input is coming from a multi-line textbox, the new line characters will be "\r\n", if this is replaced with "\n", it will work.

Answer 7

I think using Aspose.Cells for .NET component, it is really simple:

Workbook wb = new Workbook();
Worksheet ws = wb.Worksheets["Sheet1"];
Cells cell = ws.Cells;
cell[0, 0].PutValue("Hello\nWorld!");
cell[0, 0].Style.IsTextWrapped = true;
ws.AutoFitRow(0);
wb.Save("C:\\multiline_test.xlsx", FileFormatType.Excel2007Xlsx);