Binding to Microsoft Excel Workbooks

• Sep 24, 2025
• 4 minutes to read

The Dashboard Designer allows you to select required data from Microsoft Excel workbooks (XLS, XLSX or XLSM). You can select all data from the specified worksheet or you can select the cell range referenced by the specified defined/table name.

You can read files from any directory by default. To protect your application, use the AccessSettings class to explicitly specify where data sources can be read from. To accomplish this, configure rules in the DataResources property to restrict file system access to specified folders. You can call the SetRules(IAccessRule[]) method when your application starts to specify rules before a dashboard control sets its rules. The SetRules(IAccessRule[]) method can be called only once at application startup. Otherwise, the method will raise an exception.

Create a Data Source in the Data Source Wizard

To bind a dashboard to a Microsoft Excel workbook, do the following.

1. Click the New Data Source button in the Data Source ribbon tab.

2. On the first page of the invoked Data Source Wizard dialog, specify whether you want to use an existing data connection or create a new data connection.

3. On the next page, select Microsoft Excel workbook / CSV file and click Next.

4. On the next page, locate the required workbook by clicking an ellipsis button and selecting the file.

5. Then, specify import settings used to extract data from the workbook.

6. On the next page, you can select the worksheet containing the required data, the table or the defined name referring to the specified cell range.

7. On the final page, you can select columns to be included to a data source and specify their settings. The Name column allows you to specify the column name while Type allows you to specify its type.

Create a Data Source in Code

The DashboardExcelDataSource class allows you to extract data from Microsoft Excel workbooks (XLS, XLSX or XLSM) or CSV files stored on the disk or stream.

To extract data from the specified workbook or CSV file, do the following.

• Assign the path to the required file using the ExcelDataSource.FileName property. As an alternative, load the required document from a stream using the ExcelDataSource.Stream property. In this case, you need to specify the required file format using the ExcelDataSource.StreamDocumentFormat property.
• Depending on the target file format, create the ExcelSourceOptions or CsvSourceOptions class instance, specify its settings and assign the resulting object to the ExcelDataSource.SourceOptions property.
• Use the ExcelDataSource.Fill method to fill the created data source with data.

Finally, add the created DashboardExcelDataSource object to the Dashboard.DataSources collection.

The following code snippet shows how to create an Excel data source that gets data from the A1:L100 range of cells located on the Data worksheet in the SalesPerson.xlsx workbook.

• C#
• VB.NET

using DevExpress.DashboardCommon;
//...
    DashboardExcelDataSource excelDataSource = new DashboardExcelDataSource()
    {
        FileName = "SalesPerson.xlsx",
        SourceOptions = new DevExpress.DataAccess.Excel.ExcelSourceOptions(
            new DevExpress.DataAccess.Excel.ExcelWorksheetSettings()
            {
                WorksheetName = "Data",
                CellRange = "A1:L100"
            }
        )
    };
    excelDataSource.Fill();

Imports DevExpress.DashboardCommon
' ...
    Dim excelDataSource As New DashboardExcelDataSource()
    excelDataSource.FileName = "SalesPerson.xlsx"
    Dim options As New DevExpress.DataAccess.Excel.ExcelSourceOptions()
    Dim importSettings = New DevExpress.DataAccess.Excel.ExcelWorksheetSettings()
    importSettings.WorksheetName = "Data"
    importSettings.CellRange = "A1:L100"
    options.ImportSettings = importSettings
    excelDataSource.SourceOptions = options
    excelDataSource.Fill()