Getting Excel Cell Properties in Bulk

Question

When fetching values from a range in Excel, it is much more efficient to get the values in "bulk" (as a 2D array) than looping through each row and column. For ex

Answer 1

I don't think you can get those properties as an array because of how Excel stores that information. Excel does not store formatting for each cell individually but rather stores a particular blend of formats along with an internal "list" of the ranges that use that format.

You can get a sense of how the formatting is stored by creating a small test file with various formats and saving it as XML format (in 2010 at least, you need to use "XML Spreadsheet 2003").

This article may also help.