OleDB & mixed Excel datatypes : missing data

Question

I have an Excel worksheet I want to read into a datatable - all is well except for one particular column in my Excel sheet. The column, \'ProductID\', is a mix of values lik

Answer 1

Shortcut --> if you have a mixed type column in Excel: Sort your column Z to A

I pretty much went through all of the answers here and some of them worked for me and some did not, however none was desirable for me because somehow ADO did not pick the data in a mixed type column that I had in my Excel file. I had to set HDR=NO to make ADO read my spreadsheet column that is a mix of text and numbers and that way I lose the ability of using column headers in my SQL statements which is not good. If the order of columns change in the Excel file, the SQL statement will result in error or wrong output.

In a mixed data type column the key is the first 8 rows. ADO determines the data type for the column based on the first 8 rows So if you still want to modify your connection string with the extended parameters, simply sort your column Z to A on your Excel file before reading the data by ADO so this way the rows on top are the text ones and then your column will be picked as text.

If your initial rows are numbers (regardless if your column is set to format TEXT in Excel) ADO will determine that columns as a numeric type, so once it read the text rows below, it cannot cast those into number. On the opposite case, if the column is determined text, if any row if number, it can be cast as text.