This is the 5th post of a series of posts about NPOI 2.0.

This time we’re gonna see how easy it is to enable support for right to left languages in a spreadsheet.

Here’s a Microsoft page that describes Office’s right-to-left language features.

NPOI has got you covered too. The flag first appeared in NPOI 2.0 Alpha:

g. Support isRightToLeft and setRightToLeft on the common spreadsheet Sheet interface, as per existing HSSF support (poi-developers)

Let’s jump directly to the code with no further ado…

using NPOI.SS.UserModel;
using NPOI.XSSF.UserModel;
using System.IO;

namespace NPOI.Examples.XSSF.SetIsRightToLeftInXlsx
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            IWorkbook workbook = new XSSFWorkbook();

            ISheet sheet1 = workbook.CreateSheet("Sheet1");
            
            // Setting support for Right To Left
            sheet1.IsRightToLeft = true;

            sheet1.CreateRow(0).CreateCell(0).SetCellValue("This is a Sample");

            int x = 1;

            for(int i = 1; i <= 15; i++)
            {
                IRow row = sheet1.CreateRow(i);

                for(int j = 0; j < 15; j++)
                {
                    row.CreateCell(j).SetCellValue(x++);
                }
            }

            FileStream sw = File.Create("test.xlsx");

            workbook.Write(sw);

            sw.Close();
        }
    }
}

You can find the above code in the SetIsRightToLeftInXlsx sample project. I sent a pull request to Tony Qu so that this sample project gets added to NPOI’s GitHub repository.

Hope it helps!