Reading Excel files from C#

Answer 1

SmartXLS is another excel spreadsheet component which support most features of excel Charts,formulas engines, and can read/write the excel2007 openxml format.

Answer 2

I know that people have been making an Excel "extension" for this purpose.
You more or less make a button in Excel that says "Export to Program X", and then export and send off the data in a format the program can read.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186213.aspx should be a good place to start.

Good luck

Answer 3

Forgive me if I am off-base here, but isn't this what the Office PIA's are for?

Answer 4

If it's just tabular data. I would recommend file data helpers by Marcos Melli which can be downloaded here.

Answer 5

ExcelMapper is an open source tool (http://code.google.com/p/excelmapper/) that can be used to read Excel worksheets as Strongly Typed Objects. It supports both xls and xlsx formats.

Answer 6

I just used ExcelLibrary to load an .xls spreadsheet into a DataSet. Worked great for me.