Reading Excel spreadsheets with Delphi

Question

I need to read from and write to Excel spreadsheets using Delphi 2010. Nothing fancy. Just reading and writing values from specific cells and ranges on different sheets. Needs to work without having Excel installed and support Excel 2007.

Some things I've looked at:

• I've tried using ADO, which works OK for selecting everything in an entire sheet, but I haven't had much luck reading specific cells or ranges.

• NativeExcel looked promising, but it doesn't seem to be in active development, and they don't respond to e-mails.

• Axolot has a couple of products. The main product seems to be very functional, but is pricey. They have a lite version, but it doesn't support Delphi 2010.

Any recommendations? Free would be great, but I'm open to a commercial solution as long as it's reliable and well supported.

Answer 1

TMS Flexcel - I know it looks like a reporting component for Excel (which it does very well and is a very handy tool to have in your toolkit) but it also includes components for reading and displaying Excel files. I've been very impressed with how well Adrian Gallero seems to know the Excel API, including Excel 2007.

http://www.tmssoftware.com/site/flexcel.asp

Not free of course, but at 75 Euros I think it's good value.