How do I programatically interface an Excel spreadsheet?

Question

I have a request for some contract work from an organization that uses Excel as a database and wants to do some work on the Excel data via a real database. (Yeah, I know, ne

Answer 1

You don't specify a language, so if you are language agnostic .Net gives you some very powerful classes for data handling:

to open a csv file:

Imports System.Data.OleDb, Imports Excel = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel

    Dim ConnectionString As String = "Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=" + DataFolder + "\;Extended Properties='text;HDR=Yes'"

    Dim conn As New System.Data.OleDb.OleDbConnection(ConnectionString)
    conn.Open()

    Dim CommandText As String = CommandText = "select * from [" + CSVFileName + "]"
    If Filter.Length > 0 Then
        CommandText += " WHERE " + Filter
    End If

    Dim daAsset As New OleDbDataAdapter(CommandText, conn)
    Dim dsAsset As New DataSet
    daAsset.Fill(dsAsset, "Asset")

opening a sheet in a workbook is very similar - you specify the sheet name and can then fill a DataSet with the entire sheet - you can then access the Tables().Rows() of the DataSet to get each row and field, iterate over every row etc.