blogz0r ___ v57

If you’re doing any .Net ADO work with an Excel sheet, and want to explicitly enable or disable automatic handling of the first row of the sheet being set as a heading by the data handler, you have to set HDR=YES or NO in the connection string’s ‘Extended Properties’. OK, you may say, but what I ran into the other day was the following helpful message as soon as those properties were added to my connection string:

“Could not find installable ISAM”.

Huh? What’s happened? Dave’s started banging his head against a brick wall, that’s what.

It turns out that the formatting of the connection string has to be quite strict (read: stick random linebreaks in) to get it to work, so here is how I managed to get the damn thing working again:

OleDbConnection connString = new OleDbConnection(@"Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;" +
 "Data Source=c:\somefile.xls;" +
 "Extended Properties=" + (char)34 + "Excel 8.0;HDR=Yes;" + (char)34);

Hope that helps some poor sucker scouring the web who’s run into the same issue.