Question

I have a bunch of data that I’m pulling into my application which frankly is best represented as an Excel spreadsheet. By this I mean:

• There are a lot of columns which need ‘summing up’
• There is a reasonable amount of data (basically a sheet of numbers)

At the moment this is just raw data in a database, but I also have a spreadsheet which shows this data (along with formulas that I need to replicate in my app).

At the moment I’ve just got a List<of T> of each row, however I believe there might be a better collection for storing data of this type. I basically need to be able to manipulate these numbers easily.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

One option would be to use a DataTable which also has a builtin aggregation method.

For example(from MSDN):

// Presumes a DataTable named "Orders" that has a column named "Total."
DataTable table;
table = dataSet.Tables["Orders"];

// Declare an object variable.
object sumObject;
sumObject = table.Compute("Sum(Total)", "EmpID = 5");

Another advantage is that it supports LINQ queries with LINQ-To-DataSet.