The bug of using Office Excel COM component in .NET

2009-03-12T17:48:00.014+08:00

Thinking of producing a parser to read the information from Excel Document, I chose the Microsoft .NET developing environment and using the Micorosft Office COM component provided by Microsoft Office suite.

When I started the first step of the developing by using the COM component to launch the Excel program and read the basic info. It sucks! The COM component throw an COM exception(Com Exception 0x80028018 TYPE_E_INVDATAREAD) and I cannot work out what is wrong.

So later I used Google to search and find the solution on CodeProject.com, it's about the culture settings of the current .NET program thread.

If you meet the same problem, you can fix it like this:

Before launching Excel

System.Globalization.CultureInfo oldCI = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("en-US");

After closing Excel

System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = oldCI;

More Info, See it at CodeProject.com

And More Help at a russian website

xq262144 Ruminations

The bug of using Office Excel COM component in .NET