Save string array and float array from c# to Excel file

Question

I'm trying to save the results of my computations concerning the analysis of text file to excel file. for each parsed file I want to create an excel file with a word on the first line of text for each cell (I already have this data) and lines below the values calculated by my program.

I read the previous posts by various methods to interact with Excel from C # but I did not understand the characteristics of each.

Thanks and regards

Alessandro

Answer 1

There are various ways to work with Excel files in C#.

• OleDb - API designed for accessing data from a variety of sources in a uniform (SQL like) manner
• COM - using Excel Object Model, COM interface to Excel application. MS Excel must be installed on the target machine
• Write data to some file format, that excel can read

First two options are well described on csharp.net-informations.com site

If you don't need to perform any fancy Excel operations from your code I would recommand using third approach - write data to CSV file. It can be open in excel and it is easy to create CSV file.

You can use something like:

using(TextWriter tw = new StreamWriter("sample.csv") {
  // Header  
  tw.WriteLine("X,Y");

  foreach(var item in Data) {
    tw.WriteLine(item.X.ToString(InvariantCulture) + "," + item.Y.ToString(InvariantCulture));
  }  
}

Answer 2

Besides using common 3-rd party libraries, the most fastest and easiest way of 'creating' excel files is to output them as html tables. Excel is able to import such.

<table>
<tr><td>my col1</td><td>my col 2</td></tr>
<tr><td>data1</td><td>data2</td></tr>
...
</table>

Store the file with an extension of 'xls'. The scheme is - of course - somehow unsafe. More complex scenarios would better utilize some sort of 'typesafe' library. But for most "we just need to export it as excel file" scenarios, this is sufficient. One can even format the tables via CSS commands and handle different encodings.