Best way reading from dirty excel sheets

Posted by Ten Ton Gorilla on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Ten Ton Gorilla
Published on 2010-03-19T21:14:22Z Indexed on 2010/03/19 21:41 UTC
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c#

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excel

I have to manipulate some Excel documents with C#. It's a batch process with no user interaction. It's going to parse data into a database, then output nice reports. The data is very dirty and cannot be ready using ADO. The data is nowhere near a nice table format.

Best is defined as the most stable(updates less likely to break)/ clear(succinct) code. Fast doesn't matter. If it runs in less than 8 hours I'm fine.

I have the logic to find the data worked out. All I need to make it run is basic cell navigation and getvalue type functions. Give me X cell value as string, if it matches Y value with levenshtein distance < 3, then give me Z cell value.

My question is, what is the best way to dig into the excel?

VSTO? Excel Objects Library? Third Option I'm not aware of?

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