Having trouble reading excel file with the OpenXML sdk

I have a function that reads from an excel file and stores the results in a DataSet. I have another function that writes to an excel file. When I try to read from a regular human-generated excel file, the excel reading function returns a blank DataSet, but when I read from the excel file generated by the writing function, it works perfectly fine. The function then will not work on a regular generated excel file, even when I just copy and paste the contents of the function generated excel file. I finally tracked it down to this, but I have no idea where to go from here. Is there something wrong with my code?

How to freeze the header row in an Excel spreadsheet exported from ASP.NET

I’m exporting an ASP.NET gridview to Excel using the following function. The formatting is working really well, except I need to freeze the header row in Excel on the export. I’m really trying to avoid using a 3rd party Excel plugin for this, but unless there’s some archaic excel markup in my AddExcelStyling function.