Excel Worksheet.Copy method copies some links in chart as external

Question

I use following code to copy one Excel sheet to a different workbook. The source Excel sheet contains chart with series in hidden rows. (theese series are hidden by code in c# before following code)

Worksheet w; //My source worksheet with chart
w.Activate();
w.Name = CreateValidWorksheetName(targetSheetName);
w.get_Range("a1").EntireRow.EntireColumn.Copy();
w.get_Range("a1").EntireRow.EntireColumn.PasteSpecial(XlPasteType.xlPasteValues);
w.Range["A1:A1"].Select();

if (targetWorkbook != null)
{                                        
    w.Copy(targetWorkbook.Sheets[1], Type.Missing);
    targetWorkbook.RefreshAll();
}

....
targetWorkbook.SaveAs(...

Now the visible series are copied correctly, but hidden series are copied as external links, e.g.: ='C:\X[sourceWorkbook.xlsx]PDK 0-32 kv'!$D$23:$D$100

Now comes the problematic part. When I open the "targetWorkbook" I see the ugly chart including hidden series. But as soon as I open manually in Excel also the "sourceWorkbook", the charts gets automatically fixed and hidden series disapear.

How to achieve this programatically?

Answer 1

I have now lost several hours of my life working around this bug in Worksheet.Copy method. Sometimes I wonder why I was not worse student and I could be doing something more useful now...

First I tried:

//Break links
System.Array links = (System.Array) ((object)targetWorkbook.LinkSources(XlLink.xlExcelLinks));
if (links != null)
{
    for (int i = 1; i <= links.Length; i++)
    {
        try
        {
            targetWorkbook.UpdateLink((string)links.GetValue(i),
                        XlLinkType.xlLinkTypeExcelLinks);
            targetWorkbook.BreakLink((string)links.GetValue(i),
                        XlLinkType.xlLinkTypeExcelLinks);
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            Tools.LogException(ex, "targetWorkbook.BreakLink");
        }
    }
}

No success and I got even HRESULT error. It was not possible to delete external links even using visual interface of Excel, which probably only swallowed this exception.

Finally this did the trick:

w.Activate();
w.Name = CreateValidWorksheetName(targetSheetName);
w.get_Range("a1").EntireRow.EntireColumn.Copy();
w.get_Range("a1").EntireRow.EntireColumn.PasteSpecial(XlPasteType.xlPasteValues);
w.Range["A1:A1"].Select();

if (targetWorkbook != null)
{
    //Unhide all rows and then copy!!!
    w.get_Range("a1").EntireRow.EntireColumn.Hidden = false;
    w.get_Range("a1").EntireColumn.EntireRow.Hidden = false;
    w.Copy(targetWorkbook.Sheets[1], Type.Missing);
    //Then hide all rows again
    HideRows(true, targetWorkbook.Sheets[1].UsedRange, "***HIDETHISROW***");
    HideRows(false, targetWorkbook.Sheets[1].UsedRange, "***HIDETHISCOL***");

It is also important to check that the filetypes of the source workbook the target workbook match (both are xlsx), otherwise you may get:

"Excel cannot insert the sheets into the destination workbook, because it contains fewer rows and columns than the source workbook. To move or copy the data to the destination workbook, you can select the data, and then use the Copy and Paste commands to insert it into the sheets of another workbook."

 _ExcelApp.DefaultSaveFormat = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.XlFileFormat.xlOpenXMLWorkbook;