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Question

Updating an Excel Spreadsheet (Or Other Options) From Workflow

asked on March 8, 2018

Hey everyone,

Here is what we're hoping to achieve... for our criminal case files, we are required to keep a log of any time that a new document pertaining to the case is entered into the LF repository. To do this, currently, we manually update an Excel spreadsheet (with each row having the name of the document, the user who stored it, and the date it was stored). This is fine, however, we would like to streamline this process for them so that, once a new file is entered into that repository folder, it'll automatically update the spreadsheet for them.

What I have heard so far is that without very advanced scripting, this is not possible utilizing the built-in tools from workflow. Have any of you been able to achieve something similar to this in Excel? That's the preference. If not, any other proposed solutions you could offer? I've thought of two...

1. A Word doc where the Workflow activity updates the table with the information of the new document. I've kind of struck out on this one though - can't seem to get that functionality to work.

2. Having Workflow kick off a basic form that overwrites itself each time a new document is entered into that folder of the repository. I have gotten this to work for ONE line of the form, which looks great. But subsequent rows aren't filled, and that first row just gets overwritten.

I am open to suggestions, but this would be a huge help to our Legal team if we could figure something out here! Please let me know if you need anything else from me to help troubleshoot this issue.

 

Thanks,

 

Ryan

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Replies

replied on March 8, 2018

Your custom query activity should be able to update an Excel file through the ODBC driver, but I would not recommend Excel for a production piece like this.  Excel file locking can and will play havoc with your workflow since Excel files cannot have multiple opened ODBC connections at the same time.  If you are in the Excel file or you have multiple workflows try to update at the same time, you will have failed data writes to the file.   You may be better off using SQL or Access to collect the data and then export it from there.

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