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I'm trying to parse an excel spreadsheet, which in the past has been a breeze with the C# NPOI port. However, this time I'm finding that column "0" is changing from one row to the next.

I am trying to access the Cells property of an HSSFRow. It seems that cell 0 starts with the first cell that has data, rather than the first actual cell. At first I thought it was just the first cell that wasn't hidden... then I thought well maybe it's just the first cell that's after the freeze pane. Of course both those possibilities raise their own issues, but now it seems I'm finding that cell 0 is just the first one with data.

I'm trying to parse a spreadsheet that was definitely not designed with the intention of being parsed (the company who produced the spreadsheet is happy for us to use it this way, they just don't have the resources to provide a better source for our purposes at the moment).

So the data columns are staggered such that, instead of repeating a value in a column for every row, you just assume a value is repeated for every (blank cell in a) row until a new value is provided (hopefully that makes sense?).

The NPOI implementation seems to ignore/truncate empty cells though and act as though a value in any cell can be cell 0 so long as there was no data in any cell before it. This is super frustrating. How can I access data from a specific column that is ACTUALLY that column in the real spreadsheet?

BVernon
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    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17475359/how-to-use-npoi-to-read-excel-spreadsheet-that-contains-empty-cells – Tim Williams Mar 27 '19 at 05:25
  • @TimWilliams Thank you. I started trying to compensate by subtracting the starting row but for whatever reason that didn't give me consistent results and I was about to ready to pull my hair out. – BVernon Mar 27 '19 at 06:20

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Looks like I should have perused through the properties a little more carefully before posting this question. There is a property called FirstCellNum on the HSSFRow.

Personally I think this is confusing and that it would have made more sense to simply return a null value for cells requested before the first one with data rather then requiring the consumer to pay attention to this property and add it to the value of the column number they want to access. But oh well, this is how they chose to implement it.

BVernon
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