Question

I am writing a program that will allow me to open excel spreadsheets and get some specific information off of them. Each sheet contains the same information that I need, but the information is not always in the same location.

I am trying to find a way to search for specific text in an Excel sheet and have the address of the cell that text is in.

For example:
If I was looking for the text “apples”, the function will find the cell that contains apples and return its address (i.e., A5).

For accessing the Excel spreadsheet I am using Excel = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.
I have been looking all weekend for an efficient way to to do this and have been horribly unsuccessful so far. Any help I can get would be greatly appreciated.

Edit:
This is part of a much larger project, but for this particular function, I have the ability to open and close the Excel file. I have yet to start writing the search function yet, because to be perfectly honest, I am not exactly sure on even how to go about doing this. But here is what I have at this point.

public string searchExcel(string findThis)
{
    Excel.Application xlApp;
    Excel.Workbook xlWorkBook;
    Excel.WorkSheet xlWorkSheet;
    object misvalue;

    //This part will open the Excel document.
    misValue = System.Reflection.Missing.Value;
    xlApp = new Excel.ApplicationClass();
    xlWorkBook = xlApp.Workbooks.Open("C:\\temp2\\excelDocument.xlsm", 
    0, true, 5, "", "", true, Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.XlPlatform.xlWindows, 
    "\t", false, false, 0, true, 1, 0);


    //Search and get address of cell


    //This part will close the Excel document
    xlWorkBook.Close(true, misValue, misvalue);
    xlApp.Quit();

    releaseObject(xlWorkSheet);
    releaseObject(xlWorkBook);
    releaseObject(xlApp);

    xlWorkSheet = null;
    xlWorkBook = null;
    xlApp = null;
}

private void releaseObject(object obj)
{
    try
    {
        System.Runtime.Interopservices.Marshal.ReleaseComObject(obj);
        obj = null;
    }
    catch(Exception e)
    {
        obj = null;
        MessageBox.Show("Unable to release the object " + e.ToString());
    }
    finally
    {
        GC.Collect();
    }
}

Answer 1

I think something like this should do what you want:

        var app = (Excel.Application)Marshal.GetActiveObject("Excel.Application");
        var wb = app.ActiveWorkbook;
        var ws = wb.Worksheets[1] as Excel.Worksheet;
        var cells = ws.Cells;
        var match = cells.Find("apples", LookAt:=Excel.XlLookAt.xlPart) as Excel.Range;
        var matchAdd = match != null ? match.Address : null;

This will search in the first Worksheet of the current active workbook of a current Excel session.

Adjusting to fit your code:

        xlWorksheet = xlWorkBook.Worksheets[1] as Excel.Worksheet;
        Excel.Range cells = ws.Cells;
        Excel.Range match = cells.Find("apples", LookAt:=Excel.XlLookAt.xlPart) as Excel.Range;

        string matchAdd = match != null ? match.Address : null;

        if (match != null) releaseObject(match);
        releaseObject(cells);

One thing, is this assumes .Net 4.0 as I use missing arguments for the find call. If you are using a previous version you will need to pass in misValue for any parameter not used.