Paste from Excel into C# app, retaining full precision

Question

I have data in an Excel spreadsheet with values like this:

• 0.69491375
• 0.31220394

The cells are formatted as Percentage, and set to disp

Answer 1

Also not a complete answer either, but some further insights into the problem:

When you copy a single Excel cell then what will end up in the clipboard is a complete Excel workbook which contains a single spreadsheet which in turn contains a single cell:

var dataObject = Clipboard.GetDataObject();
var mstream = (MemoryStream)dataObject.GetData("XML Spreadsheet");

// Note: For some reason we need to ignore the last byte otherwise
// an exception will occur...
mstream.SetLength(mstream.Length - 1);

var xml = XElement.Load(mstream);

Now, when you dump the content of the XElement to the console you can see that you indeed get a complete Excel Workbook. Also the "XML Spreadsheet" format contains the internal representation of the numbers stored in the cell. So I guess you could use Linq-To-Xml or similar to fetch the data you need:

XNamespace ssNs = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:spreadsheet";

var numbers = xml.Descendants(ssNs + "Data").
              Where(e => (string)e.Attribute(ssNs + "Type") == "Number").
              Select(e => (double)e);

I've also tried to read the Biff formats using the Excel Data Reader however the resulting DataSets always came out empty...