Question

I am basically creating a xlsx file but I am getting an error while using that file like below.

System.IO.FileFormatException: Archive file cannot be size 0.

The way I tried.

string file = "c:\\DoneDone61.xlsx";

using(File.Create(file))
{

}

Also I cannot open excel file manually because it says the file is corrupted.

Thanks for answers in advance.

Answer 1

An Excel file which you consider to be “blank” is not just a file with no data in it (which is what you are creating). You can see this yourself by creating a document manually in Excel and then opening it in notepad. You’ll notice that it actually has data inside of it. That data is used to store information regarding the three empty sheets named “Sheet1”, “Sheet2” and “Sheet3”. Also, there is some header information so that any program looking at the file knows that it is actually a compressed file (as per the Excel file format). So, as you can see, even a pretty empty excel file still contains SOME data.

If you want to create a blank excel document using C#, you have two good options:

1. Use a library that allows you to actually work with creating Excel documents that takes care of creating the file correctly. Check out something like the Microsoft OpenXML SDK or ExcelPackage.
2. Create an empty Excel document, store it somewhere, and when you want to “create” a new empty Excel document, just make a copy of this file.