Reading an Excel Sheet containing 10000 Rows In C#.

Question

While the Jet OleDB Driver is pretty simple to use for reading an Excel sheet, it simply cant handle excel files having rows more than a thousand.

Is there any other way of reading more than 5-10k rows from an excel sheet in C#?

Answer 1

I believe you can get your answer here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1273116/reading-excel-files-as-a-server-process.

Answer 2

You can use Interop

Answer 3

If it is an ooxml file you can use open xml sdk. It is not as straightforward as the oledb driver, but it is possible.

If you can transform the excel-sheet to a csv-file, you can use Filehelpers. This can handle 100K+ records.

Answer 4

SpreadsheetGear for .NET gives you an API for working with xls and xlsx workbooks from .NET. Below is an example which demonstrates that SpreadsheetGear is faster than OleDb.

Disclaimer: I own SpreadsheetGear LLC

The code below creates a 50,000 row by 10 column workbook with SpreadsheetGear, saves it to disk, and then sums the numbers using OleDb and SpreadsheetGear. SpreadsheetGear reads the 500K cells in 0.31 seconds compared to 0.63 seconds with OleDB - just over twice as fast. SpreadsheetGear actually creates and reads the workbook in less time than it takes to read the workbook with OleDB.

You can see the live samples or try it for yourself with the free trial.

using System;
using System.Data; 
using System.Data.OleDb; 
using SpreadsheetGear;
using SpreadsheetGear.Advanced.Cells;
using System.Diagnostics;

namespace SpreadsheetGearAndOleDBBenchmark
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            // Warm up (get the code JITed).
            BM(10, 10);

            // Do it for real.
            BM(50000, 10);
        }

        static void BM(int rows, int cols)
        {
            // Compare the performance of OleDB to SpreadsheetGear for reading
            // workbooks. We sum numbers just to have something to do.
            //
            // Run on Windows Vista 32 bit, Visual Studio 2008, Release Build,
            // Run Without Debugger:
            //  Create time: 0.25 seconds
            //  OleDb Time: 0.63 seconds
            //  SpreadsheetGear Time: 0.31 seconds
            //
            // SpreadsheetGear is more than twice as fast at reading. Furthermore,
            // SpreadsheetGear can create the file and read it faster than OleDB
            // can just read it.
            string filename = @"C:\tmp\SpreadsheetGearOleDbBenchmark.xls";
            Console.WriteLine("\nCreating {0} rows x {1} columns", rows, cols);
            Stopwatch timer = Stopwatch.StartNew();
            double createSum = CreateWorkbook(filename, rows, cols);
            double createTime = timer.Elapsed.TotalSeconds;
            Console.WriteLine("Create sum of {0} took {1} seconds.", createSum, createTime);
            timer = Stopwatch.StartNew();
            double oleDbSum = ReadWithOleDB(filename);
            double oleDbTime = timer.Elapsed.TotalSeconds;
            Console.WriteLine("OleDb sum of {0} took {1} seconds.", oleDbSum, oleDbTime);
            timer = Stopwatch.StartNew();
            double spreadsheetGearSum = ReadWithSpreadsheetGear(filename);
            double spreadsheetGearTime = timer.Elapsed.TotalSeconds;
            Console.WriteLine("SpreadsheetGear sum of {0} took {1} seconds.", spreadsheetGearSum, spreadsheetGearTime);
        }

        static double CreateWorkbook(string filename, int rows, int cols)
        {
            IWorkbook workbook = Factory.GetWorkbook();
            IWorksheet worksheet = workbook.Worksheets[0];
            IValues values = (IValues)worksheet;
            double sum = 0.0;
            Random rand = new Random();
            // Put labels in the first row.
            foreach (IRange cell in worksheet.Cells[0, 0, 0, cols - 1])
                cell.Value = "Cell-" + cell.Address;
            // Using IRange and foreach would be less code, 
            // but we'll do it the fast way.
            for (int row = 1; row <= rows; row++)
            {
                for (int col = 0; col < cols; col++)
                {
                    double number = rand.NextDouble();
                    sum += number;
                    values.SetNumber(row, col, number);
                }
            }
            workbook.SaveAs(filename, FileFormat.Excel8);
            return sum;
        }

        static double ReadWithSpreadsheetGear(string filename)
        {
            IWorkbook workbook = Factory.GetWorkbook(filename);
            IWorksheet worksheet = workbook.Worksheets[0];
            IValues values = (IValues)worksheet;
            IRange usedRahge = worksheet.UsedRange;
            int rowCount = usedRahge.RowCount;
            int colCount = usedRahge.ColumnCount;
            double sum = 0.0;
            // We could use foreach (IRange cell in usedRange) for cleaner 
            // code, but this is faster.
            for (int row = 1; row <= rowCount; row++)
            {
                for (int col = 0; col < colCount; col++)
                {
                    IValue value = values[row, col];
                    if (value != null && value.Type == SpreadsheetGear.Advanced.Cells.ValueType.Number)
                        sum += value.Number;
                }
            }
            return sum;
        }

        static double ReadWithOleDB(string filename)
        {
            String connectionString =  
                "Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;" + 
                "Data Source=" + filename + ";" + 
                "Extended Properties=Excel 8.0;"; 
            OleDbConnection connection = new OleDbConnection(connectionString); 
            connection.Open(); 
            OleDbCommand selectCommand =new OleDbCommand("SELECT * FROM [Sheet1$]", connection); 
            OleDbDataAdapter dataAdapter = new OleDbDataAdapter(); 
            dataAdapter.SelectCommand = selectCommand; 
            DataSet dataSet = new DataSet(); 
            dataAdapter.Fill(dataSet); 
            connection.Close(); 
            double sum = 0.0;
            // We'll make some assumptions for brevity of the code.
            DataTable dataTable = dataSet.Tables[0];
            int cols = dataTable.Columns.Count;
            foreach (DataRow row in dataTable.Rows)
            {
                for (int i = 0; i < cols; i++)
                {
                    object val = row[i];
                    if (val is double)
                        sum += (double)val;
                }
            }
            return sum;
        }
    }
}