Allow user to edit excel in the middle of a workflow

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1

I use web scraping to create a data table.
Then I write the data table to excel but then I want the user to edit a single column of the excel file before reading it back into a data table and continuing my workflow. Is there a way to pause the process to allow user input in the excel file before continuing?

2

You can do the following:

Close the excel application scope (if you’re using one).
Use a message box activity to alert the user that they may change the excel file.
Once the user clicks “ok” on the message box the workflow can resume.

Note that the user will have to save and exit excel before closing the message box.

3

HI,

This is another approach that came into my mind, However, this actually includes two different solutions. Just like the Dispatcher & Performer example you find in the academy.

You can do this in two stages if you want full automation. it’s like this.

One solution should work on the web scraping and writing it to the excel file. This can be fully automatic as no user input is required (as far as I know by reading your post).

Now, since you want a user to edit the excel file before continuing, you can have another solution for that. This is how it works.

This solution fill check the last modified date & time, and if it falls under one minute of the current time (we can schedule this solution in orchestrator to run every minute), it will start executing and read the modified excel file and do what ever it does after that.

I know, this is bit more complex, but I think this will be more reliable than waiting for the user to click on a message box to continue. This way, you can wait for any long for the person to edit the excel file, and easily continue right after the modification is done.

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4

I started on this solution before I saw the other suggestion and it works. I actually put the message box in the excel application scope so the user does not need to open or close the excel file.

5

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