I’ve tried the OleDb driver, LinqToExcel, and Excel Data Reader to read .xls files, but all of them seem to have very annoying limitations. LinqToExcel and the OleDb driver both throw “Too Many Fields Defined” error messages if the excel files have phantom columns. The Excel Data Reader threw undefined exceptions, which I was never able to get to the bottom of.
Is there any excel driver that “just works”, and can handle slightly mis-formatted excel files?
A commercial software package would be fine. My current requirements only specify reading dates and text from cells, though more sophisticated functionality would be a plus.
[Edit]
Needs to support both XLS and XLSX file formats.
I can recommend Aspose.Cells and Flexcel… didn’t try SpreadsheetGear but hear+read lots of good things about it…
A free option (though for the newer xlsx format only!) is OpenXML 2 from MS.