Using OleDBDataReader to read strings from an Excel spreadsheet - excel

Question

I have an Excel document and one column is of type text. Some cells contain combinations of letters and digits, while other cells contain numbers only. I found out that if the cell value contains only digits, the reader interprets the values in the cells as a long integer and it truncates it. So, rather than getting "120500923", I get back "1.20501e+008"
Here is my code:
OleDbConnection myConnection = new OleDbConnection("Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source="myfile.xls";Extended Properties=\"Excel 8.0;HDR=NO;IMEX=1\"");
OleDbCommand myCommand = new OleDbCommand("Select * from [Sheet1];");
myConnection.Open();
myCommand.Connection = myConnection;
OleDbDataReader myReader = myCommand.ExecuteReader();
string[] myLine = new string[5];
while (myReader.Read())
{
for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) //read the first 5 columns
{
myLine[i] = (string)myReader[i].ToString();
}
}
How can I instruct the reader to treat all the cell values as strings and not as numbers? I prefer not to modify the excel spreadsheet, because it is edited by people and I want to keep it simple.
Thanks,
Nick

Answer 1

After some googling and experimenting, I found out some useful stuff.
I discovered that if I replace the connection string from Jet to ACE, the cell value will be considered a string.
So, I changed the first line in the code as below:
OleDbConnection myConnection = new OleDbConnection("Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source=\"myfile.xls\";Extended Properties=\"Excel 12.0;HDR=YES;IMEX=1\"");
Since my computer is a Windows 10/64 bit, the default MDAC driver installed was 64 bit. I had to uninstall it and install the 32 bit version (I use SharpDevelop and apparently I can only compile 32 bit applications), from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=13255. I am able to use version 12, even if I don't have Office 2003 or later installed.