How To Add a Ribbon to Excel with C# Interop

By klanguedoc

This is Part 3 of a three part tutorial on creating an Excel SQL Server CRUD application using ADO.NET. You should read Part 1 and Part 2 first.

Add code to load, update and save data back to the data store

In order to save data back to the database I will show you how to implement CRUD operations. To implement this I am going to create a Ribbon and add a button to save the changes that are done to the Excel File back to the database. I will also provide some code to load the data from the database when the application is loaded.

To help you with creating Ribbon in Excel and C#, Check out my other Tutorial on Creating Excel Applications using Ribbon and C# for more ideas and information on Creating Ribbons with C# which provides a detailed walk through on creating ribbons with C#.

To add the ribbon, right-click on the ExcelADO solution and do “Add” -> “New Item”
Select the Data node under Visual C# to filter the available templates.
Select Ribbon (Visual Designer) template. Provide a name for the ribbon and cs code file
Click “ok” to create the ribbon

Add New Ribbon

private void button1_Click(object sender, RibbonControlEventArgs e)
 {
   Globals.Sheet1.projectIdentificationBindingSource.EndEdit();
   Globals.Sheet1.projectIdentificationTableAdapter.Update(Globals.Sheet1.excelDS.ProjectIdentification);
 }

From the Visual Designer, change the name of the Group object to “gtProject” and change the caption to “Projects”
Add a Button from the Toolbox by dragging & dropping from the Ribbon Controls onto to gtProjects group and change the caption to “Save”

Double-click on the button to open the code editor

Navigate to the button1_Click method and add the following code:

The first line signals to the BindingSource that edited has completed. The second line tells tableAdapter to update the DataSet which linked to the database table throught the Data source to perform one of the CRUD operations (Insert, Update or Delete) that I configured in the Data Source section.

using Excel = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel;
using ExcelTools = Microsoft.Office.Tools;
.....

private void Project_Load(object sender, RibbonUIEventArgs e)
 {
      Excel.Worksheet worksheet = (Excel.Worksheet)Globals.Sheet1.Application.ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets[1];
      ExcelTools.Excel.Worksheet extendedWorksheet = ExcelTools.Excel.Worksheet.GetVstoObject(worksheet);
  }

Also checkout the code I added to the load method:

You will need to add the following references:

The first line initialises a Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel worksheet object that points to the first worksheet. This can be any sheet in the workbook. The second line calls the GetVstoObject method of the Microsoft.Office.Tools and passes the active worksheet and automatically loads the data in the DataSet that is linked to the database into the worksheet.

Consclusion

That concludes this tutorial. As you can see it is fairly easy to create a sophisticated CRUD application with Excel and SQL Server using ADO.NET and C#.