Convert excel file to text

Question

0.00/5 (No votes)

See more:

C#3.0

C#

How to convert excel file to Text format without installing ms office in c#.net version 4.0

Posted 22-Oct-13 8:58am

premkumarsinghisking

Add a Solution

Comments

ZurdoDev 22-Oct-13 14:59pm

Perhaps if you explained more there may be a better way.

3 solutions

Add a Solution

Add your solution here

Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML

Preview 0

…

Existing Members

Sign in to your account

...or Join us

Download, Vote, Comment, Publish.

Your Email
Password
Forgot your password?

Your Email
This email is in use. Do you need your password?
Optional Password

I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Please subscribe me to the CodeProject newsletters

When answering a question please:

Read the question carefully.
Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or edit the question and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.

Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

Richard C Bishop · Answer 1 · 2013-10-22T09:01:00

Solution 1

Well, it is not really a conversion. Basically you read the Excel file and write it to a text file for example.

See here for reading an Excel file[^]

and

here for writing a text file[^]

Of course you will have to extrapolate the pertinent material from each link and combine them to accomplish your goal.

Posted 22-Oct-13 9:01am

Richard C Bishop

Updated 22-Oct-13 9:03am

v2

Comments

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 22-Oct-13 15:57pm

My 5. And I credited this answer and added some detail/alternatives in my answer, please see.
—SA

Richard C Bishop 22-Oct-13 16:02pm

Thank you, and a very thorough addition indeed.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 22-Oct-13 16:17pm

Thank you.
—SA

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Answer 2 · 2013-10-22T09:56:00

First of all, as it is correctly stated in Solution 1, this is not really a conversion. There is no one-to-one correspondence between Excel and text data, so you need to define some mapping between the two. And you should expect that saving data as text in most cases will cause some loss of information and increase of information entropy. Please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_%28mathematics%29[^],
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mapping[^],
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_%28information_theory%29[^].

If you need to read Excel without installation of Office (quite understandable), the main method of doing so would be using Open XML SDK:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30425[^].

This way, you can support new XML-based Office formats (such as .DOCX, .XLSX), ECMA-376 standard:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_XML_formats[^],
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML[^].

This way, you can work without Office installed. Also, the documents are supported by 3rd-party software. Please see my past answers:
Convert Office-Documents to PDF without interop[^],
Need a rather unique WPF text editor control[^],
Hi how can i display word file in windows application using c#.net[^],
Read a word file without using Interop.word dll...Do not want to install word in IIS..[^].

This is another option: http://npoi.codeplex.com/[^].

Microsoft explained why using Office interop would be unsuitable in some settings:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q257757#kb2[^],
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257757/en-us[^].

—SA

Ranjan.D · Answer 3 · 2013-10-22T09:10:00

Solution 2

Reference Excel Objects Library , a COM library in your project. Then Read the excel file and write to text file one line at a time.

Posted 22-Oct-13 9:10am

Ranjan.D