Question

Range.NumberFormat does not work outside vba

Asked by: prakash_prk

Dear Friends,

I just want to change the display format of a cell to fixed date format "dd.mm.yyyy" for all the cultures. I have attached the code I tried. All the options are working well in (en-US). But none of them work on German Culture (de-DE).

The result on german cultured windows & excel.

yyyy-12-dd
yyyy-11-dd
yyyy-10-dd
yyyy-09-dd

But, If i set the NumberFormat from an VBA Macro ["yyyy-MM-dd"] it works well on german machine.

How do I fix the problem?

Is Range.NumberFormat and Range.NumberFormatLocal  both are same from automation outside excel?

As per the documentation 

Excel.Application app = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.Application();
app.Visible = true;
 
app.Workbooks.Add(System.Reflection.Missing.Value);
 
Excel.Worksheet worksheet = (Excel.Worksheet)app.ActiveSheet;
Excel.Range range =  worksheet.get_Range("A1", "A1");
Excel.Range range2 = worksheet.get_Range("A2", "A2");
Excel.Range range3 = worksheet.get_Range("A3", "A3");
Excel.Range range4 = worksheet.get_Range("A4", "A4");
range.Value2 = "2008-12-28";
range2.Value2 = "2008-11-27";
range3.Value2 = "2008-10-26";
range4.Value2 = "2008-09-25";
 
range.NumberFormatLocal = "yyyy-MM-dd";
range2.NumberFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd";
range3.NumberFormatLocal = "yyyy-MM-dd;@";
range4.NumberFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd;@";

                                  
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Asked On
2009-01-19 at 23:29:11ID24066173
Topics

Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet Software

,

C# Programming Language

Participating Experts
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Points
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Comments
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Answers

 

by: roryaPosted on 2009-01-20 at 00:10:52ID: 23418037

Your problem I believe is that .Net passes the system lcid to the Excel object model, so both Numberformat and Numberformatlocal end up acting like NumberFormatLocal. You need to add something like the following before working with Excel (taken from PED)

 

Public gThread as System.threading.thread = system.threading.thread.currentthread
 
Public gCultureUs as system.globalization.cultureinfo = new system.globalization.cultureinfo("en-US")
 
gThread.CurrentCulture = gCultureUS
                                              
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by: prakash_prkPosted on 2009-01-28 at 03:05:43ID: 31539879

Thanks for your help rorya.

Instead of changing the culture of the entire thread I have changed the culture for the single property set using reflection.

                        //use reflection to invoke the number format property. because we need en-US culture inorder to work on other cultures.
                        //if we set the NumberFormat from US Culture then excel will automatically changes it to the culture it running.
                        rangeType.InvokeMember("NumberFormat", System.Reflection.BindingFlags.SetProperty | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Instance | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Public
                            , null, singleCell.EntireColumn, new object[] { format }, Common.Tools.en_US_Culture);

.

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