Question

I’ve set a windowsform up.
Currently it it has a single DataGridView that is linked to a single table in a SQL Server db.
I can browse the current data in the table.

How do I set things up so that a user can copy and paste a single column of data from an Excel sheet into the DGV ?

If, in Excel I have ‘x’ in A1 and ‘y’ in A2 then this must preserve the number of rows when pasted into the DGV i.e for this example it would still be over 2 rows

I’ve tried to adapt the following from Code Project. If fails on the line if (oCell.Value.ToString() != sCells[i]) with a NullReferenceException was unhandled What am I doing wrong?

    private void uxChargeBackDataGridView_CellDoubleClick(object sender, DataGridViewCellEventArgs e)
    {
        PasteClipboard();
       //uxChargeBackDataGridView.Rows[e.RowIndex].Cells[e.ColumnIndex].Value = Clipboard.GetText();
    }


    private void PasteClipboard()
    {
        try
        {
            string s = Clipboard.GetText();
            string[] lines = s.Split('\n');
            int iFail = 0, iRow = uxChargeBackDataGridView.CurrentCell.RowIndex;
            int iCol = uxChargeBackDataGridView.CurrentCell.ColumnIndex;
            DataGridViewCell oCell;
            foreach (string line in lines)
            {
                if (iRow < uxChargeBackDataGridView.RowCount && line.Length > 0)
                {
                    string[] sCells = line.Split('\t');
                    for (int i = 0; i < sCells.GetLength(0); ++i)
                    {
                        if (iCol + i < this.uxChargeBackDataGridView.ColumnCount)
                        {
                            oCell = uxChargeBackDataGridView[iCol + i, iRow];
                            if (!oCell.ReadOnly)
                            {
                                if (oCell.Value.ToString() != sCells[i])
                                {
                                    oCell.Value = Convert.ChangeType(sCells[i],
                                                          oCell.ValueType);
                                    oCell.Style.BackColor = Color.Tomato;
                                }
                                else
                                    iFail++;
                                //only traps a fail if the data has changed 
                                //and you are pasting into a read only cell
                            }
                        }
                        else
                        { break; }
                    }
                    iRow++;
                }
                else
                { break; }
                if (iFail > 0)
                    MessageBox.Show(string.Format("{0} updates failed due" +
                                    " to read only column setting", iFail));
            }
        }
        catch (FormatException)
        {
            MessageBox.Show("The data you pasted is in the wrong format for the cell");
            return;
        }
    }  

Answer 1

Very simple and will do the trick:

private void gridView_CellDoubleClick(object sender, DataGridViewCellEventArgs e) 
{
    gridView.Rows[e.RowIndex].Cells[e.ColumnIndex].Value = Clipboard.GetText();
}

edit*

If you want to paste into multple cells and not a single cell then check out this blog post:

http://happysoftware.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/c-code-snippet-paste-to-datagridview.html