What sort of Excel file is it? If its a CSV ten you don't need serialization. If its a normal excel file then serialization won't work unless you do it all manually.
If you're reading a CSV file then you'd simply use a StreamReader or ADO.NET. I don't see an advantage to doing it any other way, although that doesn't mean that there isn't one.
the reason for my thought of using serialization is, after reading the content of the excel file (which has historical data of a stock), I would like to show that data in a chart (just like they show in yahoo finance).
does this requirement need the data to be read from CSV file in serialization format?
The point of serialisation is to convert an object into a form that can easily be sent over a serial connection, hence the name. If you want to create a chart then I don't see how that helps you. What you would want for a chart would be tabular data, so I would think that using ADO.NET to read the CSV into a DataTable would be the most effective in that case. If you prefer there would be less overhead (I think) using a StreamReader and you could still read the data into a DataTable or some other form, like a jagged or multidimensional array or some form of collection. I guess the advantage of ADO.NET is that more is done for you and you have the power of SQL to perform complex queries on the data if desired.
Serialization pros and cons
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