Excel Automation: the CultureInfo bug

Valentino Vranken — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 10:40:53 +0000

If you’re doing some Excel automation like creating a sheet with some graphs from .NET, you may run into the “Old format or invalid type library” error which is quite nicely described in this Microsoft Support article. At this moment there’s no fix available, but the article describes not one, not two, but three workarounds. I chose the third one where you switch the Culture for your thread to “en-US”.

When giving this a try, it solved the error mentioned above but then I started getting “Exception from HRESULT: 0×800A03EC” errors. After searching for a while I finally found the reason: you should not switch the Culture back to the original one after you’ve added your new Excel workbook as shown in the workaround. First finish whatever you want to automate in Excel and switch the Culture back at the end.

In C# this looks like the following:

   1: // code below assumes the following using statement

   2: // using Excel = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel;

3:

   4: // capture current Culture settings

   5: System.Globalization.CultureInfo systemCultureInfo = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;

   6: try

   7: {

   8:     // temporarily change CultureInfo to en-US

   9:     System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("en-US");

10:

  11:     Excel.Application excelApplication = new Excel.Application();

  12:     // create new workbook

  13:     Excel._Workbook workbook = (Excel._Workbook)(excelApplication.Workbooks.Add(Missing.Value));

  14:     // get active sheet

  15:     Excel._Worksheet worksheet = (Excel._Worksheet)workbook.ActiveSheet;

16:

  17:     // create your graphs or whatever you were planning to automate in Excel

18:

  19:     // give the user control over Excel

  20:     excelApplication.Visible = true;

  21:     excelApplication.UserControl = true;

  22: }

  23: catch (Exception ex)

  24: {

  25:     // handle exception

  26: }

  27: finally

  28: {

  29:     // put CultureInfo back to original

  30:     System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = systemCultureInfo;

  31: }

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Excel Automation: the CultureInfo bug