NamedRange Control

You can add NamedRange controls to a Microsoft Office Excel worksheet at design time or at run time in document-level projects.

Starting in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1), you can add NamedRange controls to a worksheet at run time in an application-level add-in. For more information, see How to: Add NamedRange Controls to Worksheets.

Note:
By default, dynamically created named ranges are not persisted in the worksheet as host controls when the worksheet is closed. For more information, see Adding Controls to Office Documents at Run Time.

NamedRange controls can only consist of ranges on specific sheets. NamedRange controls cannot have relative names that apply to all sheets, and they cannot consist of ranges that span two or more worksheets in a workbook (3-D ranges).

A named range would appear to be a good candidate for complex data binding since it can have many cells; however, a range is merely a collection of cells that cannot be easily mapped to a particular column from a dataset. Therefore, NamedRange controls only support simple data binding. The ListObject control can be used for complex data binding. For more information, see ListObject Control.

The NamedRange control can be bound to a data source using the DataBindings properties. The default data binding property of the NamedRange control is Value2.

If the data in the bound dataset is updated through any mechanism, the NamedRange control reflects the changes.

Formatting that can be applied to a Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.Range can be applied to a Microsoft.Office.Tools.Excel.NamedRange control. This includes borders, fonts, number format and styles.

When you add a NamedRange control to your worksheet from the Toolbox, Visual Studio Tools for Office automatically generates a name for the control. You can change the name in the Properties window.

The following events are available for the NamedRange control:

• BeforeDoubleClick

• BeforeRightClick

• BindingContextChanged

• Change

• Deselected

• Disposed

• Selected

• SelectionChange

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Concepts

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