In last few articles we have discussed about NPOI libraries for .NET. There could be some cases, while reading Excel files, you may get an exception with 'The supplied spreadsheet seems to be Excel 5.0/7.0 (BIFF5) format. POI only supports BIFF8 format' as message.

In this quick tip, we are going to discuss about this issue, the way to handle it and the way to read the same Excel workbook content.

In the last two articles, we have learned how to use the NPOI library to read Excel 2007 (.xlsx) and Excel 97-2003 (.xls) file format. We have also discussed more about the APIs and shared the code snippet for you to understand it easily.

In this article, we will learn how to read Excel 95 and older workbooks easily using the free Apache NPOI libraries in your C#/.NET applications.