Accessing Excel Spreadsheet with C# occasionally returns blank value for some cells

Question

I need to access an excel spreadsheet and insert the data from the spreadsheet into a SQL Database. However the Primary Keys are mixed, most are numeric and some are alpha-n

Answer 1

This isn't completely right! Apparently, Jet/ACE ALWAYS assumes a string type if the first 8 rows are blank, regardless of IMEX=1. Even when I made the rows read to 0 in the registry, I still had the same problem. This was the only sure fire way to get it to work:

try
{
    Console.Write(wsReader.GetDouble(j).ToString());
}
catch   //Lame unfixable bug
{
    Console.Write(wsReader.GetString(j));
}