Read Excel-Cells without Excel App

Help
,
1

Dear all,

I have an issue when using UiPath Studio to read out cells out of an Excel. UI Path Studio (2016.2.6232) is running on a VM with no Excel installed and it throws me the following error:

Message: Error openning workbook. Make sure Excel is installed.
Source: Excel
Exception Type: Exception

I use the ExcelApplicationScope with visible set to “False” and the file type is .xlxs as I thought this will not need an Excel App installed.

image.png1264×424 21.8 KB

Is there another possibility? I am not allowed to install Excel…

Thanks for your help in advance!

Cheers,
Mauro

2

I would also like to hear if there’s any plans for this.

Currently we’re running our own package when the server can’t have Excel installed, but a built-in functionality would be much welcome.

3

In this case you can use the activities under System->File->Workbook but they have limitations (no concurrent access for example)

1 Like
4

That was one of the reasons we needed to roll our own.
The other significant one was that there’s no read-only option that we could find, meaning that if the file gets locked (user didn’t close and went home for the weekend or something didn’t release the filehandle, which happens with network drives sometimes) there was no way to read the content.

But for simple scenarios it should work… Are there any format limitations (.xls, .xlsx, .xlsm are all supported?)?

5

Thanks for the input. I tried to use ReadCell from Workbook but this is just possible if it is embedded into the ExcelApplicationScope… Any other suggestions?

6

With System-> File->ReadCell you won’t use anymore Excel Scope but set the WorkbookPath property.

7

Sorry I was using the one under Excel that got me confused. It works like this thanks!

8

Wow. Someone needs to change the official UIPath Excel training video. The video clearly suggests that we can use the Excel Application scope and simply uncheck the “visible” checkbox if Excel isn’t installed.

I had to swap out my Excel scope activity for generic read/write range activities. Glad I found this.

4 Likes
9

When there are huge number of rows to read from Excel, using Excel OLEDB driver to read and write is very fast and effective.It doesnt require Excel application to be installed in you system, you just need OLEDB driver to be installed.

10

Could you please provide the guidance(steps) for whole process.