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Reading and writing to Excel 2007 or Excel 2010 from C# - Part I: Primer

Thu, 06/11/2009 - 19:36 |  Robert MacLean

[Note: See the series index for a list of all parts in this series.]

Over the past week I have been learning about the complexity of working with Excel 2007 native file format - XLSX or as it is known correctly, SpreadsheetXL. There is three ways to work with it, firstly build your own parser - just too much work for me or second use OpenXML SDK format which Microsoft provides. The current version, at time of writing that was version 1, of the SDK is not great: there is very little (if any) benefit of using it over the third method. There is a V2 SDK currently in beta which looks brilliant and frankly when released would be the recommend route.

The third way, which is the way I chose is the uses new features introduced in the .NET Framework 3.0.

What is a XLSX file? A XLSX file is actually just a ZIP file which contains a number of XML files in it.

image

This means all you need to do is open the XLSX file as a ZIP file, get the right XML files (or parts as they are referred to) out of it and parse those.

If you are thinking this is a .NET only solutionthe chart below is from Doug Mahugh which shows a number of ways across a number of technologies/OS’s to do the same thing. This series will focus on the .NET way.

image

What is nice about using System.IO.Packaging to read the file over the direct ZIP options, is that there are some helper methods to make it easier when working with any of the new formats (docx, xlsx etc...)

image

Tags: .NET, Development

good article

http://totaldotnet.com

Submitted by Neha jain on Wed, 12/15/2010 - 18:44.

Hi,

I use a tool for creating an Excel Spreadsheet with C#, it can reading and writing to excel 2007 or excel 2010 from c#
http://www.e-iceblue.com/Introduce/excel-for-net-introduce.html

Submitted by Visitor on Wed, 07/07/2010 - 15:08.

Spire.XLS

Submitted by Visitor on Wed, 07/07/2010 - 15:10.

[...] good starting point is a series of great articles from rmaclean’s blog which couldn’t explain better how to work with the xlsx Excel 2007 native [...]

Submitted by An Excel file Viewer in Silverlight 4 on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 11:07.

[...] part 1 for the premise and for a list of all [...]

Submitted by Reading and writing to Excel (.xlsx) from C# - Part IV: Putt on Wed, 08/19/2009 - 17:48.

[...] part 1 for the premise and for a list of all [...]

Submitted by Reading and writing to Excel (.xlsx) from C# - Part III: Sha on Wed, 07/29/2009 - 23:18.

[...] part 1 for the premise and for a list of all [...]

Submitted by Reading/Writing to Excel 2007 from C# - Part II: Basics | SA on Sat, 07/25/2009 - 17:30.
Hi, There is alternative way to handle Excel files in C#. You could try some 3rd party component like GemBox spreadsheet component which is free for commercial use if you need less then 150 rows and 5 sheets. http://www.gemboxsoftware.com/GBSpreadsheet.htm Filip
Submitted by Filip on Mon, 07/06/2009 - 13:51.
Agree, there are a number of quality 3rd party controls and Microsoft is releasing v2 of the openxml toolkit which also makes it very easy to use.
Submitted by Robert MacLean on Sat, 07/25/2009 - 14:56.
looking forward to the rest of this series for sure!
Submitted by ryan CrawCour on Mon, 06/15/2009 - 04:54.

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