First of all, thanks for answers! 9 total answers. Thank you.
Bad news: all of the answers had some quirks or didn't work quite right (or at all). I've added a comment to each of your posts.
Good news: I've found a way to make it work. This solution is pretty straightforward and seems to work in all the scenarios (mousing down, selecting text, tabbing focus, etc.)
bool alreadyFocused;
...
textBox1.GotFocus += textBox1_GotFocus;
textBox1.MouseUp += textBox1_MouseUp;
textBox1.Leave += textBox1_Leave;
...
void textBox1_Leave(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
alreadyFocused = false;
}
void textBox1_GotFocus(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
// Select all text only if the mouse isn't down.
// This makes tabbing to the textbox give focus.
if (MouseButtons == MouseButtons.None)
{
this.textBox1.SelectAll();
alreadyFocused = true;
}
}
void textBox1_MouseUp(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
{
// Web browsers like Google Chrome select the text on mouse up.
// They only do it if the textbox isn't already focused,
// and if the user hasn't selected all text.
if (!alreadyFocused && this.textBox1.SelectionLength == 0)
{
alreadyFocused = true;
this.textBox1.SelectAll();
}
}
As far as I can tell, this causes a textbox to behave exactly like a web browser's address bar.
Hopefully this helps the next guy who tries to solve this deceptively simple problem.
Thanks again, guys, for all your answers that helped lead me towards the correct path.
You can use a library called ExcelLibrary. It's a free, open source library posted on Google Code:
ExcelLibrary
This looks to be a port of the PHP ExcelWriter that you mentioned above. It will not write to the new .xlsx format yet, but they are working on adding that functionality in.
It's very simple, small and easy to use. Plus it has a DataSetHelper that lets you use DataSets and DataTables to easily work with Excel data.
ExcelLibrary seems to still only work for the older Excel format (.xls files), but may be adding support in the future for newer 2007/2010 formats.
You can also use EPPlus, which works only for Excel 2007/2010 format files (.xlsx files). There's also NPOI which works with both.
There are a few known bugs with each library as noted in the comments. In all, EPPlus seems to be the best choice as time goes on. It seems to be more actively updated and documented as well.
Also, as noted by @АртёмЦарионов below, EPPlus has support for Pivot Tables and ExcelLibrary may have some support (Pivot table issue in ExcelLibrary)
Here are a couple links for quick reference:
ExcelLibrary - GNU Lesser GPL
EPPlus - GNU (LGPL) - No longer maintained
EPPlus 5 - Polyform Noncommercial - Starting May 2020
NPOI - Apache License
Here some example code for ExcelLibrary:
Here is an example taking data from a database and creating a workbook from it. Note that the ExcelLibrary code is the single line at the bottom:
//Create the data set and table
DataSet ds = new DataSet("New_DataSet");
DataTable dt = new DataTable("New_DataTable");
//Set the locale for each
ds.Locale = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;
dt.Locale = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;
//Open a DB connection (in this example with OleDB)
OleDbConnection con = new OleDbConnection(dbConnectionString);
con.Open();
//Create a query and fill the data table with the data from the DB
string sql = "SELECT Whatever FROM MyDBTable;";
OleDbCommand cmd = new OleDbCommand(sql, con);
OleDbDataAdapter adptr = new OleDbDataAdapter();
adptr.SelectCommand = cmd;
adptr.Fill(dt);
con.Close();
//Add the table to the data set
ds.Tables.Add(dt);
//Here's the easy part. Create the Excel worksheet from the data set
ExcelLibrary.DataSetHelper.CreateWorkbook("MyExcelFile.xls", ds);
Creating the Excel file is as easy as that. You can also manually create Excel files, but the above functionality is what really impressed me.
Best Answer
Something like that should be what you need