Question

I need to embed an excel sheet portion (not the whole sheet) in a user control in C# language. And I want to manipulate the data on it and save it in a collection.

What is the best way to go about it?

Answer 1

I would open the spreadsheet with the Excel COM Library. If you add a reference to the Microsoft Excel Object Library, you can get to the Com interface.

Add these using statements:

using Microsoft.Office.Interop; using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel; 

Then you can read from the spreadsheet by doing something like this:

   private void GetData(string fileName, string tabName)     {         Workbook theWorkbook;          Application ExcelObj = null;         ExcelObj = new Application();          theWorkbook = ExcelObj.Workbooks.Open(fileName,             Type.Missing, Type.Missing, Type.Missing, Type.Missing,             Type.Missing, Type.Missing, Type.Missing, Type.Missing,             Type.Missing, Type.Missing, Type.Missing, Type.Missing,             Type.Missing, Type.Missing);           Sheets sheets = theWorkbook.Worksheets;         Worksheet worksheet = (Worksheet)sheets[tabName];          Range range = worksheet.get_Range('A1:A1', Type.Missing);          string data = range.Text as string;          //         // TODO : store the data         //          theWorkbook.Close(false, fileName, null);     } 

This code would read the contents of the A1 cell into a string.

One of the quirks of working with the Excel COM interface is that you have to access data in a Range, even if you just want one cell. You can set the range to be a group of cells, then you can iterate over the collection that it returns to get the contents of each cell.

You would also want to add some error checking/handling on the file name and tab name.

There is also a way to use ODBC to read from Excel, but the spreadsheet has to be formatted in a certain way. There has to be a header data in row 1. I’ve found it easier to use the COM interface.

Once you have acquired the data you need, you could put it into a typed DataSet. Then you could bind that dataset to a DataGridView if you’re using WinForms or a ListBox in WPF. If you just want to save the data in an XML format, you could use the DataSet WriteXml function to store the data to a file.