My brother-in-law popped round a couple of weeks ago to see how I was recovering from my knee surgery. We got onto the topic of IT (as always) and how his department at a large financial company were in the process of coming up with their own adhoc financial system More...

Have you ever been given a spreadsheet to import into some system or other?

Have you then tried creating a simple dataloading program to read the data, run some dataloading rules against it before loading it into the correct fields on the target system.

Have you found this has caused problems in code because:

A) Everything is a string
B) It is hard to access the correct spreadsheet columns in code be because of a lot of column index numbers being used.
C) The Excel runtime must be installed on the computer running the data loading tool.

If you have shared this pain and have not found a better solution then please read on.
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