.NET xlReader for Microsoft® Excel is a set of the classes, designed to help .NET developers to read Microsoft® Excel files from their applications. To provide familiar feel and look for the developers and allow future extension of the component, current version of the .NET xlReader for Microsoft® Excel implemented as a .NET Managed Provider with the read-only capabilities and allows to read the data from the native Microsoft® Excel files without using any additional providers or Microsoft® Excel itself. .NET xlReader for Microsoft® Excel is a 100% .NET managed code and designed to achieve the best performance with the minimal usage of the RAM.

Known issues and limitations

Current version of the .NET xlReader for Microsoft® Excel has several limitations on how it works and what it supports during reading of the data from Microsoft® Excel files. Future versions of the component could contain functionality to resolve current limitations. Current limitations are:

   - No support for password-protected Microsoft® Excel files.

   - .NET xlReader for Microsoft® Excel supports only Excel files saved in a BIFF8 binary format supported by Microsoft® Excel 97 or newer version of Microsoft® Excel and Excel files saved in XLSX, XLSM, XLTX, XLTM formats supported by Microsoft® Excel 2007 or newer version of Microsoft® Excel.

   - Limited support for the SQL statements. Current version of the reader supports only delimited list of the spreadsheet names in following format: "shreadsheetname1;spreadsheet2;.... spreadsheetN;" and treats each spreadsheet as a table. List of the spreadsheet names should contain at least one spreadsheet name. See more details inside of examples on how to query data from the spreadsheets.

   - Component does not support updates of the data from the DataTable/DataSet to the underlying Microsoft® Excel file. ExcelDataAdapter allows populating DataTable/DataSet with the data from the spreadsheet(s), but current version does not support updates.