Any way to change header row attributes using CsvHelper?

Question

I'm using CsvHelper to write a program that outputs a bunch of data onto a CSV file. The header row is a row of about 35 columns. Here's some of the code here...

[CsvColumn(Name = "Lease Name", FieldIndex = 1)]
public string leaseName2 { get; set; }

[CsvColumn(Name = "Field Name", FieldIndex = 2)]
public string fieldName2 { get; set; }

[CsvColumn(Name = "Reservoir", FieldIndex = 3)]
public string reservoir2 { get; set; }

[CsvColumn(Name = "Operator", FieldIndex = 4)]
public string operator2 { get; set; }

[CsvColumn(Name = "County", FieldIndex = 5)]
public string county2 { get; set; }

[CsvColumn(Name = "State", FieldIndex = 6)]
public string state2 { get; set; }

[CsvColumn(Name = "Majo", FieldIndex = 7)]
public string majo2 { get; set; }

I was just wondering if I could, so to speak, change the columns width or change the background color of the cell or do anything to that matter. I've been searching the web for a while and have not come up with anything. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Simple answer is, you can't do that with a CSV. That's not what it is or what it's meant for. It's just comma-delimited-values, that's it.

If you want to control aesthetics, you'll need to choose a format that can support these options, such an actual excel (xls) format.

This is why when you open a CSV in excel and try to save it with formatting, it warns you all formatting will be lost if you keep the .CSV format.

Answer 2

The CSV files do not contain any formatting so Excel has no clue how to format the data that was imported from the file. It simply applies a few default formatting.

What ever you import by CSV, it will never have any fancy color/ font/ column width/ whatever formatings.

As workarounds, 2 ideas come to my mind:

1. I am not familiar with Excel programming, but I am sure that you could implement a VBA Macro that could be run after the data import that the does the formatting for you.

2. You could implement stay in C# and implement the import in code. There are SDKs available from Microsoft to help you with it. I would guess that you have all formatting functionality available in there, too. This would surely work, but I have to admit, the work to implement this manually does not seem to reasonable to me.