I think I'm running into a case of "the easiest answers are the hardest ones to find" and I haven't come across any searches that give this to me in a straightforward way. This is for Excel 2010 and VS 2010 within an existing VSTO (C#) project.
I have an Excel worksheet that contains 4 columns of data that I would like to use as a source for a DataGridView. Can someone please provide C# code snippets for (1) getting the data from a particular worksheet and populating a custom object with it? (2) binding the object (like an IEnumerable list) to a Datagridview and (3) some snippets for the update and delete functionality that would be inherent to the grid and feed back to the source worksheet.
I know I'm asking for a lot here, but so much of the VSTO information seems to be dis-jointed and not always easy to find. Thanks!
Best Answer
Edit: Great, I just noticed that I missed a big part of your question, getting updates and deletes back to the worksheet. I have absolutely no idea if that is possible but I think that makes my solution worthless. I'll leave it here anyway, maybe it can help in any way.
Why do you need VSTO? As far as I know VSTO is used for Office Add-Ins. But since you want to show the data in a DataGridView I assume that you have a WinForms application that should just access a workbook. In this case you can simply open the workbook by using Office Interop. Just add a reference to Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel to your project and add a
using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel;
statement.MSDN reference documentation for Excel Interop can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms262200%28v=office.14%29.aspx
I'll give you the Excel part, maybe someone else can do the rest.
First, open Excel and the workbook:
Then somehow get the correct worksheet. You have a few possiblities:
Then get the correct range. You didn't specify how you know where the needed data is, so I'll assume it is in fixed columns.
Get the values:
That two dimensional object array can then be used as a data source for your DataGridView. I haven't used WinForms for years so I don't know if you can bind it directly or first need to get the data into some specific format.
Finally close Excel again:
Correctly closing Excel after using Interop is a task itself because you have to make sure that all references to COM objects have been released. The easiest way I have found to do this is to do all the work except opening and closing Excel and the workbook (so my first and last code block) in a seperate method. This ensures that all COM objects used in that method are out of scope when
Quit
is called.