What is an alternative to ADO.NET, but elegant way in C# to read Excel files

Posted by Khnle on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Khnle
Published on 2010-06-03T19:20:29Z Indexed on 2010/06/03 19:24 UTC
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ADO.NET just fails miserably when it's used to read Excel files where a column contains mixed data types. It appears that it tries to determine the data type of a column, and then assume the rest of the entire column is of the same data type. Here are some backgrounds:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2968111/how-to-prevent-ado-net-from-altering-double-values-when-it-reads-from-excel-files

http://blog.lab49.com/archives/196

What is an alternative approach that doesn't require automation, Excel to be co-installed, is simple (since the input excel file will only have one worksheet in each file).

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