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I have a C#/.Net job that imports data from Excel and then processes it. Our client drops off the files and we process them. I don’t have any control over the original file.
I use the OleDb library to fill up a dataset. The file contains some numbers like 30829300, 30071500, etc… The data type for those columns is ‘Text’.
Those numbers are converted to scientific notation when I import the data. Is there anyway to prevent this from happening?
The OleDb library will, more often than not, mess up your data in an Excel spreadsheet. This is largely because it forces everything into a fixed-type column layout, guessing at the type of each column from the values in the first 8 cells in each column. If it guesses wrong, you end up with digit strings converted to scientific-notation. Blech!
To avoid this you’re better off skipping the OleDb and reading the sheet directly yourself. You can do this using the COM interface of Excel (also blech!), or a third-party .NET Excel-compatible reader. SpreadsheetGear is one such library that works reasonably well, and has an interface that’s very similar to Excel’s COM interface.