I’m trying to simply create an Excel file and add some files and columns.
It’s my 1st attempt at that and I’m getting overhelmed by the amounts of related activities that show up in my Windows project when I search for “Excel” and the same happens to me when I google or search in the forum for help or tutorials.
Furthermore sometimes different activities use the same Excel icon, make them undistinguishable.
Well you’ve made it more confusing for yourself by adding the O365 package aswell as the Excel package, are you trying to create the workbook on the desktop or in sharepoint? You are seeing ‘duplicate’ activities because you are adding packages that cover both scenarios and they require different code to execute.
When you use either one or the other packages I don’t see how its confusing or cluttered and even if using both they are clearly separated in the activities pane via the groupings. The only thing I could agree on is perhaps more diverse icons.
You forgot to comment why the existence of the “Classic” and the “regular” packages. If both do the same and both are compatible with the same kind of project, then why duplicating? And no mention, either, to the System → File → Workbook activity.
Anyway, I was looking for “Excel” activities and then it’s me who made it confusiong when they showed up on the search tool. Ok.
They don’t do the same. I did not say they did. The O365 package is for working with Excel files directly on Sharepoint using the Excel O365 functionality the same way you can edit in the browser.
The Excel package is for working on the desktop, if they were the same they wouldnt require different code to execute as I mentioned above.
If you press F1 on any activity you can see this by looking at the documentation, was something missing there?
Thank you for your feedback regarding the Excel activities, I’ve filed this for us to try and improve the experience. I’ll start by providing a bit of background regarding the number of activities and then try and help you out with the issue.
As you’ve identified, we have 3 sets of activities for Desktop Excel and on top of that, O365 activities. I’ll cover the Desktop Excel ones for now.
Workbook: These activities perform very fast, especially with large volumes of data. On top of this, they don’t require Excel to be installed on the machine you’re running this, one of the reasons why they perform so well. I recommend using them when dealing with large files and only are looking for basic operations (read / write data)
Classic: These are older activities that we still support while we’re looking at getting parity between them and the Modern ones. Quite a lot of functionality as compared to Workbook activities. However, they don’t work as well with multiple Excel processes and they don’t have as much support in terms of easily accessing the info on files - requires more typing into to configure a file. To filter them out, you can use the setting below from the Activities panel or fully filter them out from the Project Settings:
Modern: They’re the ones we recommend to work with as they offer a lot of functionality and an easy to use interface. You have access to the sheets, table and other data from the Excel file and you can use the Indicate functionality. We’re working on matching the functionality from the Classic activities but in the meantime, you can mix activities from both Classic and Modern within a Use Excel File scope.
Going back to your use case, if you’d like to create a new file, I would start with the Modern package and a Use Excel File activity with the settings Create if not exists set to true as below:
If you’d like to follow the structure of a certain file, you can set Template file to true and the configuration will follow the structure of another file. From there, you can add the required activities.
It’s clear to me which activity I have to use. But I’m struggling with the “Append Range” one, as my aim is simply to add rows and columns. But, once again… is it THAT difficult to provide at least ONE example in the documentation pages??
Believe me, I’ve been searching for hours and I can’t find absolutely ANY example of the proper format for what these “Excel range to append” and “Append after range” values. I’m trying merely by trial and errors, as I’ve been watched dozens of Youtube videos for hours (as there are the most sources when googling). Not only it’s time consuming and tiring, but they don’t provide the info I’m looking for. Even docs for other activities that could be format-compatible ( Activities - Append Range (uipath.com)) don’t provide any example, either. This is BASIC. If there’s no example neither tutorials or any other info, how are we supposed to sort this out?
What is the use case you are trying to implement? I can help with that and then I can follow up to improve the documentation but I’d like to first understand what you are trying to implement.
Thank you for your interest; I’m just trying to fill in values to an Excel spreadsheet.
I already solved it by different means, but the thinks is that I’m always bumping into the same stone: lack of examples in the documentation, and I already complained here about it. It slows down learning and productivity. At least ONE example is needed to figure about how the info need to be passed as parameters in almost all of them.
