Writing to excel using OleDb

Question

I am attempting to export rows of data from sql to excel but my Insert Command seems to fail every time. I have spent a good deal of time trying to create this but I have fi

Answer 1

I actually found a Microsoft article for you that has the entire code done - you can likely copy & paste whichever solution you like most. Here's the link:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306023

It seems like the one with CopyRecordset is your easiest approach, although they do explain the one I mentioned (using a tab-delimited file).

Edit: Here's my original answer for the sake of completeness. See the link above instead for more details and for a possible better solution.

This is not an answer to your question but a suggestion to change your approach (if you can). Excel tends to be very slow when adding data through COM calls and I assume OleDB uses COM internally. In my experience the fastest (and coincidentally the least painful way) to output data to Excel was to generate a tab-separated text file with all the data and then just import the file into Excel and use COM interop to perform any formatting on the sheet. When I generated Excel reports this way, most of my reports used to be generated almost 100x faster than using the Excel COM object model. (I don't know if this would be the same for OleDB calls, since I've never used OleDB with Excel but I'd be willing to bet the OleDB adapter uses COM internally.)

This would also take care of your embedded space problem since tab would be the column separator.

In your particular situation, I'd import the text file into Excel into a new sheet and then copy & paste it into the IRS sheet, at the right location. When done, the temporary sheet can be deleted.