UiPathTeam.XLExcel.Activities

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UiPathTeam.XLExcel.Activities

Package: UiPathTeam.XLExcel.Activities
Author: @radu_bucur

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Hi,

Because of the issues with large Excel Files encountered by several RPA developers (like for example here: Approach Manipulate excel with 10000 plus records), I decided to implement a set of custom activities that allow the user to better read these huge Excel files. Some of the activities in the current package have been developed by me a while ago, but I finally decided to extend their functionality and to group them into a single package that will be available on the UiPath gallery.

This package has just been released and I am eager to receive your feedback and concerns, as well as to assist you with using this package.

@rakeshsv and I are currently working on further extending this package and providing you with additional features like Write Range and Get Last Column activities.

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Good work. I had a couple requests though…

I frequently use the WorkbookApplication variable for using Close Workbook and .GetSheets(). It would be helpful if we could output the XL Excel scope to a Workbook variable similar to the other Excel scope.

Also, it would be helpful if we could minimize the XL Excel scope for using this in a Flowchart because it takes up a lot of space (but maybe that isn’t possible).

Thanks.

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Seems that my previous thought was that it was similar to the Excel Application scope but it’s more like the Workbook Read Range. It would also be useful if it did act more like the Excel Application scope, so you can perform the action while the file is opened and also work on CSV and XLS files (which is currently does not work)

Regards.

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Hi Clayton!
Thanks for the feedback, I’m aware of the .xls and .csv. CSV files can be processed simply as text files or even read using a stream so I don’t think its worth investing time in creating custom activities for them.
For .xls, I’m working on the issue and I think I’ll have a workaround in the next few weeks.
The minimize is a really good ideea, I’ll look into it.

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Also, I dont want to open the files precisely because they are really big. It can take a lot of time and eat up some resources. My approach parses the inner xml files inside the xlsx file, this way we don’t overload the RAM memory when processing very large files. This is exactly the thing that I’d like to avoid :slight_smile:
The same think would happen if I were to provide a Workbook variable, I would simply have to load up the entire Sheet at once and this would take up a lot of resources. So that is not something that we can do, unfortunately.

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Thanks for your reply.
The XLS and CSV thing is not that important, but just requires a check for if the extension is xlsx and complicates the code slightly (I don’t even think if the large data causes problems with those extensions).

Also, being unable to read a file when someone has it open does bring problems when all you want is the data, but I understand if it uses too much memory.

Regardless, thanks for your work, and have a good one!

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Hello,
This is an awesome package. One suggestion if possible, when the excel file is blank i.e. even headers are missing then the read range activity gives error saying ‘Sequence contains no elements’ something. Can this be altered to allow blank file ? I mean it can happen that a blank is kept for execution by mistakenly and in that case the BOT would fail

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Hi @radu_bucur : Thank you very much for your post. I have successfully read the excel file of 224 Columns with 205K rows with Read Range from (XLExcel.Activities).

But after calculation I want to write my result into the same file on 225th column but after 10 minutes It gives me an error as you may see in the below screenshot. It perfectly fines with 10,000 Rows and 224 Columns but When I try on 205K rows it does not execute.

image
image767×287 13.1 KB

Pl. guide and help.

Many thanks,