Excel export from DatagridView

• Download ExportToExcel - 1 MB

Introduction

A very common problem in winform applications occurs when data should be exported from DatagridView to Excel, there's some commercial workarounds to solve this problem. This article describe a simple versatile and free way to do.

Background  

The work to exporting to Excel is made by "Office XP Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs)"

Initially, the data is obtained from datagridview's datasource, formated and then exported to a excel file throw Excel COM Interiop. 

The Datagridview datasource could be :

• ArrayList of Entities 
• Dataset with at least 1 datatable
• Datatable

Data should be stored in a DataTable before beign exported to excel, if DataGridView's DataSource is an ArrayList, then the ArrayList is converted to a DataTable using the method ArrayListToDataTable

ArrayList arr = (ArrayList)dataGridView.DataSource;
       dt = ArrayListToDataTable(arr);

 Once the data is stored in the datatable is exported to excel using the method dataTable2Excel

dataTable2Excel(dt, dataGridView, pFullPath_toExport, nameSheet);

Using the code

You should only copy the following 2 files to your project 

• ExportToExcel.cs
• UC_DataGridView.cs
• UC_DataGridView.Designer.cs

Use the DataGridView in you project and export to excel using the next code

Tools.ExportToExcel.ExportToExcel exp = new Tools.ExportToExcel.ExportToExcel(); 
exp.dataGridView2Excel(this.dgvDataToExport, path, "NameSheet"); 

Points of Interest 

Please note that the titles in excel file was obtained from DataGridView headers, not from DataTable name columns. 

There's a bug, titles of columns are not exported correct, i am working on it. 

History 

15/10/2008 First Release