A Handy-Dandy Little Class for Accessing Excel Worksheet Cells

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Introduction

Sometimes, when you're using the Excel.Interop classes, you want to open a worksheet from code and tweak the values of various cells. It's hard to remember the syntax.

oSheet = (Excel.Worksheet)oBook.Worksheets[1];
((Excel.Range)oSheet.Cells[1, 1]).Value2 = "blah";

I don't know about you, but I might like to encapsulate the Excel.Worksheet object I am using in a nice class with perhaps an operator [] overload, so I don't have to remember crazy syntax all the day long or be looking up code snippets and copying and pasting. I'm thinking that code of the form:

cellObj[1, 1]="blah";
int myCellValue = Convert.ToInt32(cellObj[1,2]);

is perhaps a bit more readable. So let's see if we can't make a class to help us with this.

ExcelCell Class

First, let's dive right into the meat. Here's the definition of our class, ExcelCell, which encapsulates the Excel.Worksheet object from Excel and allows access to individual cells.

using Office = Microsoft.Office.Core;
using Excel = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel;
 
public class ExcelCell : Object
{
    private Excel.Worksheet oSheet;
 
    public ExcelCell(Excel.Worksheet oSheet)
    {
        this.oSheet = oSheet;
    }
 
    public object this[int row, int column]
    {
        get
        {
            if (oSheet == null)
                throw new InvalidOperationException(
                "Excel.Worksheet reference is null.");
            return ((Excel.Range)oSheet.Cells[row, column]).Value2;
        }
        set
        {
            if (oSheet == null)
            throw new InvalidOperationException(
                "Excel.Worksheet reference is null.");
            ((Excel.Range)oSheet.Cells[row, column]).Value2 = value;
        }
    }
 
    public Excel.Range GetRange(int row, int column)
    {
        if (oSheet == null)
            throw new InvalidOperationException(
        "Excel.Worksheet reference is null.");
        return ((Excel.Range)oSheet.Cells[row, column]);
    }
}

Note: You should make sure that you have the Microsoft.Office.Core and Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel modules loaded as references in your project. They can be version 12 and up.

Using the Class

To use the class, say you have an instance of Excel.Application open and an instance of Excel.Workbook open as well (in .xls or .xlsx etc. format), and your instances are named oExcel and oBook, respectively. Let's see this class in action:

ExcelCell cell = new ExcelCell((Excel.Worksheet)oBook.Worksheets[1]);
 
cell[4, 2] = "happy";
cell[4, 4] = "day"; // sets Value2

int cellValue = Convert.ToInt32(cell[4,5]);
// reading a cell -- very straightforward.

And that's all she wrote!

Points of Interest

This class is interesting in that it reveals how to overload the [,] operator. A quick Google search can also find you the information, but watch how simplified your Excel programming gets after putting this class in your program.

History

• 23 Nov. 2010: Article submitted.