New user help and Excel read question (Interop and OleDb)

[sporadic]

Forgive me I'm a new user. I can't find how to search the newsgroups, only the forums.

I'm trying Excel Interop to read Excel spreadsheets using C#.
I'm "simply" loading the entire contents of the spreadsheet into RAM for manipulation.
All cell contents are loaded as strings, into a string[][].
I realize I'm not making full use of this Interop like most of you are, but the choices seem limited for C#->Excel interaction.
Cycling through cell by cell is painfully slow!
What are my other options?

I also tried using OleDb which is incredibly fast, but it also seems to "assume" data types and reads in long number strings as scientific-format numbers!
Is there a way around this data-type assuming by OleDb?
OleDb really seems like the ideal application for reading my Excel sheets, and the fastest.

Thanks everyone!

Mark

 

[sporadic]

Well I'm able to convert the assumed data types on the fly after the data set is filled and I'm pulling out values.
The problem now is that I'm getting empty values in fields where it has assumed a data type and the field doesn't match correctly.

Is there a way to make the OleDb just blindly dump string values into a data set with NO datatype guessing???

If I have 2 different data types in my Excel column it will simply ignore one!
Example:
4.011E+16
40110010100010013

and I want to pull both in as strings, not numbers.

It actually pulls in a blank value for the first one!
Granted this is certainly not all the Excel file but I hope it's clear enough.

 

[Tom Ogilvy]

Check out this article:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;257819

about half way through see the discussion of this problem and using the IMEX
extended property.

 

[sporadic]

Fixed it!
Used Extended Properties=Excel 8.0; HDR=No;MAXROWS=100;IMEX=1;
The IMEX=1 is what fixed it.

 

[sporadic]

Thanks for the article Tom!