Read the blog
 

LINQ to Excel Data

Ready to get started?

Download a free trial:

Download Now

Learn more:

Excel ADO.NET Provider

Easily connect .NET applications with real-time data from Excel spreadsheets. Use Excel to manage the data that powers your applications.

In this article

Related articles


LINQ provides general-purpose query facilities in .NET Framework 3.0 and above and provides one easy way to programmatically access data through from CData ADO.NET Data Providers. This example uses LINQ to access information from the Excel Data Provider.

This article demonstrates how to use LINQ to access Excel tables through the CData ADO.NET Data Provider for Excel. To do this you will LINQ to Entity Framework, which is used to generate the connection and can be used with any CData ADO.NET Data Providers to access data via LINQ.

See the help documentation for a guide to setting up an EF 6 project to use the provider.

  1. In a new project in Visual Studio, right-click on the project and choose to add a new item. Add an ADO.NET Entity Data Model.
  2. Choose EF Designer from Database and click Next.
  3. Add a new Data Connection, and change your data source type to "CData Excel Data Source".

  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    The ExcelFile, under the Authentication section, must be set to a valid Excel File.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    Excel File='C:/MyExcelWorkbooks/SampleWorkbook.xlsx';
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting ExcelEntities as our entity connection in App.Config.
  6. Enter a model name and select any tables or views you would like to include in the model.

Using the entity you created, you can now perform select , update, delete, and insert commands. For example:

ExcelEntities context = new ExcelEntities(); var sheetQuery = from sheet in context.Sheet select sheet; foreach (var result in sheetQuery) { Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.Name); }

See "LINQ and Entity Framework" chapter in the help documentation for example queries of the supported LINQ.