including excel data in a new vb app during build (VB2010)

Hi, I am working on a project for a local charity to build a library catalogue of their books/music. I have built the main form and database but I would like to include the data they have already collated in excel (over 1000 records) so that it doenst have to be manually input into the finished program.

is there an easy way to do this, I tried a cut and paste from excel into the data table in my project but unless I'm doing something wrong it wont let me paste the data into the table.

Save it in Excel, and EXPORT it to a delimited-file. It will let you choose which columns, their order, and format them for you to read in.

Then, you can create a one-time app to import that data.

thank you, by delimited file I am assuming you mean something like a .csv file?

also can I import this data before I compile my final .exe for my project, or do I have to wait until my project is complete before importing?

Really doesn't matter. You should probably keep an empty copy of the program, ready to turn in, after IMPORTING any file that you might want.

Also, sample data with different values would be a benefit to test your code.