Adding MS Excel library to VS 2015 Express

Question

I have VS Express 2015 installed and MS office 2007 on my pc. I need to read some values from an excel sheet. I added Microsoft Office 12.0 Object Library but I can't use this

using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel;

I get the following error : The type or namespace name 'Interop' does not exist in the namespace 'Microsoft.Office' (are you missing an assembly reference?)

Answer 1

As you are looking to read some values from an excel sheet EPPlus is grate and easy way to work with Excel file. This is a wrapper for Open office XML.

public static DataTable getDataTableFromExcel(string path)
{
    using (var pck = new OfficeOpenXml.ExcelPackage())
    {
        using (var stream = File.OpenRead(path))
        {
            pck.Load(stream);
        }
        var ws = pck.Workbook.Worksheets.First();  
        DataTable tbl = new DataTable();
        bool hasHeader = true; // adjust it accordingly( i've mentioned that this is a simple approach)
        foreach (var firstRowCell in ws.Cells[1, 1, 1, ws.Dimension.End.Column])
        {
            tbl.Columns.Add(hasHeader ? firstRowCell.Text : string.Format("Column {0}", firstRowCell.Start.Column));
        }
        var startRow = hasHeader ? 2 : 1;
        for (var rowNum = startRow; rowNum <= ws.Dimension.End.Row; rowNum++)
        {
            var wsRow = ws.Cells[rowNum, 1, rowNum, ws.Dimension.End.Column];
            var row = tbl.NewRow();
            foreach (var cell in wsRow)
            {
                row[cell.Start.Column - 1] = cell.Text;
            }
            tbl.Rows.Add(row);
        }
        return tbl;
    }
}