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Asked: 2026-05-23T18:17:39+00:00

I’ve been requested to import an excel spreadsheet which is fine but Im getting

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I’ve been requested to import an excel spreadsheet which is fine but Im getting a problem with importing a certain cell that contains both numeric and alphanumeric characters.

excel eg

      Col
       A            B              C
Row  0123    8 Fake Address    CF11 1XX
     XX123   8 Fake Address    CF11 1XX

As per the example above when the dataset is being loaded its treating Row 2, col (A) as a numeric field resulting in an empty column in the array.

My connection for the OleDb is 

var dbImportConn = new OleDbConnection(@"Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=" + dataSource 
                + @";Extended Properties=""Excel 8.0;HDR=No;IMEX=1"";")

In this connection i have set the IMEX = 1 which should parse all contents as string into the dataset. Also if i change Row 1 Col (A) to have ‘XX123’ the entire Col (A) successfully parses as string! Unfortunately this is not going to help my scenario as the excel file is passed from an external client who have also advised that do not have the means to pass through the file with a header row which would solve my issue.

My one thought at this point is when I receive the file to edit the file (programmatically) to insert a header but again as the client may change how many columns are contained this would not be a safe option for me.

So basically I need to find a solution for dealing with the current format on the spreadsheet and to pass through all cells into the array. Has anyone come across this issue before ? Or know how to solve this ?

I await your thoughts
Thanks
Scott
ps If this is not clear just shout

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Hi There is a registry setting called TypeGuessRows that you can change that tells Excel to scan all the column before deciding it’s type. Currently, it seems, this is set to read an x number of rows in a column and decides the type of the column e.g. if your first x rows are integers and x+1 is string, the import will fail because it has already decided that this is an integer column. You can change the registry setting to read the whole column before deciding..

    please see this also

    http://jingyangli.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/imex1-revisit-and-typeguessrows-setting-change-to-0-watch-for-performance/

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