I have a large amount of data to insert into an worksheet of an existing Excel workbook. The Excel workbook will have other worksheets containing calculations and a pivot tables. The data may have as many as 60,000 rows and more than 30 columns. This solution must work for both Excel 2003 and Excel 2007.
Using the Excel OLE object is way too slow so we are attempting to load the data from a CSV file. We have come up with a method to load the data by placing the data onto the clipboard and then pasting it into the worksheet. I feel this is a quite a kludge. Is there another way to programmatically load a CSV file into a worksheet? Or perhaps a different solution altogether?
Update: We got slammed with another task before we could fully investigate the answers. We should be able to get back to this in a couple of weeks. I'll be sure to update again when we get back to this task.
Thanks for all of the answers to date!
XLSReadWrite is a component that can read and write excel files from Delphi. It's fast and it has support for Excel 2003 and 2007. You can create new excel files as well as open existing ones and add/modify them.
Also you do not need to have Excel installed to be able to use it.
See http://www.axolot.com/components/xlsrwii20.htm
Any chance you can drop the requirement for this to work with Office 2003? I would have recommended the Open XML Format SDK. It lets you bind managed code assemblies to spreadsheet documents that can handle events such as Open or Close, and read and write to cells in the document, among other things. Alternatively, you can use it to manipulate XSLX documents from an application. Quite slick, actually.
Since this won't work for you, how about writing a macro that pulls in the CSV file when the spreadsheet is loaded?
you can load the csv into listview or usin OLEDB provider to load it on DBGrid, then export it into xls file format using TMxExport component from Max Components:
Max Components
Have you tried linking the csv file directly into the worksheet.
Go to Data -> Import External Data -> Import Data
change the file type to 'Text Files'
You can then refresh the worksheet when the csv is update.
NOTE: I have not done this with the volume of data you have indicated, so YMMV
Actually there is a way that is quite fast, pretty old tech (nowdays) but is probably the fastest.
It's ADO or for earlier versions DAO (note not ADO.NET)
You can read a CSV file using ADO and the JET Engine to get the data into a ADO recordset, then an Excel Range Object has a CopyFromRecordSet method that will copy (very fast) from the ADO (or DAO) recordset.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa165427(office.10).aspx
You can try to use Tab Separated Values instead of CSV - than you just paste this into Excel :)
Related
I need to read xls files in my IOS app. First of all, I want to convert xls files to csv format files, then my app parse csv files, but I can't find any ios library to convert xls to csv, please help me
If you have a .xls file, you can use the open source DHlibxls library to read the file into your app. This is an ObjectiveC framework that wraps a C-based library. The library is quite mature.
ios or any objecive-framework doesn't provide any thing for accesseing Microsoft's xls :(
To convert-xls to/fro csv is itself a project in it!!!
On top of this, there are different format of xls, now xlsx files. And writing a xls and reading it back in proper way is tooooo-cumbursome task to accomplish. However we have managed to read it but it is not 100% efficient :(
I guess in near future you may want to move to xlsx file then your task will be a lot more difficult. You can check yourself, change the file name extension to .zip and unzip you will see many files, one having row numbers, another columns, third with links, fourth with contents and so on. Mapping and getting in correct form in not impossible but needs a lot of work.
There can be many other ways to do, I can suggest to use java api to do, or even save you xls to csv directory from excel, then your work will be easy.
I need to export some data to an .XLS file, pdf, and print.
I already tried the simple solution: exporting it to .CSV with CHCSVWriter. It works for printing and saving it to pdf (I open the CSV in a UIWebView and get the PDF or print from there). However, to use the CSV to be open in excel has two main problems:
1 - First, as the name says, in the CSV the values are separated by commas, and in some versions of Excel, it requires the user to separate 'manually' in cells.
2 - I have hebrew characters, and I already tried all the string encodings, and can't have both hebrew and latin characters.
So, after giving up after days of trying to use CSV to solve the issues above, I gave up. How can I export my data to XLS?
The LibXL library provides this functionality for both xls and xlsx formats. There is no iOS version, but people say the iOS version is coming. You may want to contact LibXL support to confirm this.
EDIT:
The iOS version is available now.
This article explains how to programmatically create an Excel (.xls) file without using any external library. It just opens a file stream and it writes XML contents straight to it.
It is written in C#, but the core information coming out of it is the XML formatting used to create nodes and fill attributes for corresponding cell values and formatting.
Please consider I have not tried this myself, I found it while doing a search. Please feel free to ask if some C# bits are not clear. HTH
I recently upgraded to Excel 2010. I was working on a spreadsheet and wrote some code and went to save it and I get this box that pops up. I'm not sure what to do.
From Office 2007 on, Excel has two different file types: XLSX and XLSM. The former is just data and formatting without macros or anything "dangerous." The latter allows macros and other programmatic functionality. The reason for the split is mainly security as each one has a distinct extension and icon to better inform the user on whether or not the file could potentially contain dangerous content.
In this instance, you need to click No, then in the Save As... options select "Excel Macro-Enabled Workbook." That will give you the full functionality of the original document.
I have a list of URL and I should loop over them every minute or so and save the last successful access time into an XML file or database. Obviously, the URL and some short description will be saved in file as well.
I'm wondering whether XML files are reliable enough or I'm better with a database? If I must go with the database option, which one?
Please advise. Thanks.
You can use XML file for this purpose.
There are lot of options for XML like XML Data Binding, TXMLDocument, XML with ClientDatasets etc.
The simplest option is XML with ClientDataSet.
This is the procedure:
Drop a ClientDataSet on the the form.
Add FieldDefs you need to the ClientDataSet.
Right click on the ClientDataSet component and click Create Dataset.
Right click again and click Save To MyBase XML Table.
You XML is ready and from now onwards you can use ClientDataSet1.LoadFromFile() and ClientDataSet1.SaveToFile() functions to load and save data.
Then you can assign ClientDataSet DataSource to the DBGrid.
I would also use a XML (or JSON) file storage. A simple way to build wrapper classes for a XML file is the XML Schema Binding Generator Wizard in Delphi Professional, or the Data Binding Wizard (in Enterprise / Architect). You only need to provide an example XML or a W3C XSD file. The wizard will create DOM based classes and binding code.
Tutorials:
Delphi XML Binding Wizard Tutorial
Delphi Programming Tutorial #39 - XML Data Binding
I would not use XML. To modify an XML file you have to rewrite it, XML is not good at random read and writes, unless you can modify it only in memory and then write it when needed. Well, every minute is not a problem, unless the XML gets very large. An XML file is reliable as much as your application is in writing it. If you need more, you should consider a database. For local access something alike SQLite or Firebird embedded could be your choice.
So this is another exporting to Excel question.
I have a page that has a table with formatting by stylesheet.
When I export the page by setting the ContentType to application/excel and Content-Disposition to attachment, I can export the table to Excel (not CSV). However, it loses all formatting. I think it's because Excel does not load CSS and I guess that's reasonable.
So, in a scenario where I have to show the table on the web and also export to Excel, both with similar (even if not exact) formatting, what would be the best approach without using something like NPOI?
I am trying to minimize the work and keep the single template if possible. Is it necessary for me to create two separate templates: one with stylesheet, the other with embedded style in the table itself for Excel?
Having a single template with conditional formatting inside would be very messy.
Any ideas?
If you not yet solve the problem I'll recommend you to use Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office (see http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c6e744e5-36e9-45f5-8d8c-331df206e0d0&displaylang=en). With this way you will be able create an XLSX file without installing Excel on the server. XLSX file is compressed (like ZIP file) collection of xml files. Open XML SDK 2.0 helps you create and change XLSX file as pure xml files. At the first time if you look at Open XML SDK a lot of things look like strange, but it's only at the beginning. There are so named "Open XML SDK 2.0 Productivity Tool" (a part of Open XML SDK 2.0) which can generate a lot of useful code for you. Moreover you can create a nice Excel document which you can use as a prototype (template) of the document which you will create. So you can solve the problem of complex formating without writing of a lot of code.
Look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc850837(v=office.14).aspx for some examples and on http://openxmldeveloper.org/default.aspx. See also Creating Excel document with OpenXml sdk 2.0 as a start example. You can find also a lot of good stuffs on http://www.codeplex.com about Open XML SDK
there are several aproach
you could instantiate a excel object on your server using VSTO, and then write the document on memory and write to response the native file, but this aproach could be a litle expensive if you create a excel object per request, so you could try to do a singleton object that wraps the excel object instance
You can create a report (rdlc file) with a similar look to the grid. Then, you can have an action where you instantiate a LocalReport, pass the data you want to it and call its Render method. You then return the byte array returned by the Render method.