OleDb connection to Excel; how do I select fixed width, unbounded height?

Question

I\'m using OleDb to select data from excel spreadsheets. Each spreadsheet can contain many small tables, and possibly furniture like titles and labels. So it might look like

Answer 1

Couple possible solutions:

1. Put your tables on separate worksheets, then simply query the whole worksheet.
2. Give each table in Excel a name (in Excel 2007, select the table, right-click, and choose Name a range...), then in your query, use this name instead of "Sheet1$B14:D65535".

Hope that helps.

EDIT

Here's a third idea:

I'm not sure what you're using to query your database, but if your query engine supports variables (like Sql Server, for example) you could store the result of...

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM NameOfServer...Sheet1$

...in a variable called @UsedRowCount, that will give you the number of rows actually used in the worksheet. So, @UsedRowCount = LastRowUsed - InitialBlankRows.

You might then be able to use string concatenation to replace "65535" with @UsedRowCount + @InitialBlankRows. You would have to set @InitialBlankRows to a constant (in your example, it would be 3, since the heading row of the first table is located at Row 4).