ADO ConnectionString Excel

This page is still a work in progress.

You need to use different providers depending on the Excel version you want to access.

Provider

Microsoft ACE OLEDB

Connect to Excel 2007 (and later) files with the Xlsx file extension. That is the Office Open XML format with macros disabled.

Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0

With Office 2010, there are new drivers, the 2010 Office System Driver, which will be provided in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. You can use these drivers to let your application connect to Access, Excel and text files in a 64 bit environment utilizing the new 64-bit drivers.

You don't need to buy or install the Office suite, the components are available as a separate download.

Arguments

The Provider supports the following arguments:

FMT=

This argument tells ADO which delimiter is used for the file. Although the comma is probably the most widely-used delimiter for text files, it's not the only one. Another popular delimiter is the TAB.

Format	Description	Schema.ini Syntax	Connection String Syntax
Tab Delimited	Fields in the file are separated by tabs	Format=TabDelimited	FMT=TabDelimited
CSV Delimited	Fields in the file are separated by commas (note that there should not be a space between the comma and the start of the next field name or value)	Format=CSVDelimited	FMT=CSVDelimited
Custom Delimited	Fields in the file are separated by some character other than a tab or a comma (with one exception: you can't use the double-quote as a delimiter). For example, the asterisk is used as the delimiter	Format=Delimited(*)	FMT=Delimited(*)
Fixed-Length	Fields in a file take up a specific number of characters. If a value is too long, "extra" characters are chopped off the end. If a value is too short, blank spaces are appended to it to make it fill out the requisite number of characters. The columns (fields) of the file need to be defined in a file named Schema.ini.	Format=FixedLength	FMT=FixedLength

HDR=

Specifying HDR=YES means that the test file contains a header row. A header row simply means that the first row in the text file is a list of fields, with all subsequent rows containing the actual data.

IMEX=

Value 1 tells the driver to always read "intermixed" (numbers, dates, strings etc) data columns as text. Note that this option might affect excel sheet write access negative.

External links

• Connection strings for Excel