Preserve information about Excel's named ranges

In Excel, one can define a "named range". It would be nice to be able to preserve those ranges in the dataset. Perhaps something like this:

let workbook = excelReader.AsDataSet(namedRangesInTheirOwnTables: true)

This could create additional tables in the DataSet, one table for each named range.

That is an interesting idea. If enough people vote for it, we could do it.

I'd be happy to take this on, at least for the XLSX format. I would like to get some feedback my suggested approach, though. I can't think of a simple/elegant way without ending up reading the referenced worksheets twice. You can't do that now because you don't have random access to worksheets (it's just a forward-only cursor of forward-only cursors). I think having random access would be valuable in its own right performance-wise for large workbooks where you want only a fraction of the worksheets (my use case for this project).

I am ok with supporting random access. I think my only requirement would be that it doesn't negatively affect performance for the usual forward-only use.

Great, I'll have at it.

Thanks. Can you do it in a branch off of develop? On 6 Feb 2015 00:54, "Steve1961" [email protected] wrote:

Great, I'll have at it.

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/ExcelDataReader/ExcelDataReader/issues/25#issuecomment-73162093 .

Is this still something being looked into? I have a current requirement to find named ranges. I like the product very much and don't want to have to move to OleDb Thanks

Hi,

Probably not in the short term.

As far as I know, the ranges are expressed as formulas, so this feature depends on issue #332 initially. Next we need to parse the formulas in order to extract the ranges. I suspect both are non-trivial, alas.

Ok, many Thanks for the quick reply.