How to Read an Excel Spreadsheet in Visual Basic

Excel spreadsheets are popular files used to store finances and sales analytical data. Programmers can use these spreadsheets to automate process and import data to an application, manipulate the values, and display them for users. It's also useful to read data from a spreadsheet and export it to a larger database like Microsoft SQL Server. Using Visual Basic, it's possible to read Excel files with only a few steps.

Instructions

1. Define the variables and instantiate the class. Before using any of the spreadsheet class methods and properties, the class needs an assigned variable.
   Dim excelapp As Excel.Application
   Dim excelWb As Excel.Workbook
   Dim excelSheet As Excel.Worksheet
   excelapp = CreateObject("Excel.Application")

2. Open the Excel file and assign it to the workbook object.
   excelWb = excelapp.Workbooks.Open("c:\\myExcelfile.xls")
   excelWb.Visible = True
   excelWb.Activate()

3. Activate the spreadsheet. You must specify which worksheet to use since Excel can have several spreadsheets in one file.
   excelSheet = excelWb.ActiveSheet

4. Assign the first cell to a variable. You can assign multiple cells to an array, but for this example, one cell is read and printed to the console.
   string cell1 = excelSheet.Cells(1, 1).Value

5. Verify the data by printing it to the console.
   Console.WriteLine(cell1);

References

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