It has been a while since I wrote in forum to introduce you new progress our team made. If you have been following our blogposts, you may know we have just released Dynamo 2.12.0 - our biggest point release ever since 2.0 with a bunch of improvements and new features developed for your ease of using Dynamo. In this post, I am going to focus on a small slice of the release - the new Dynamo Excel nodes using OpenXML standards. Introducing two brand new nodes, the Data.OpenXMLImportExcel (An alternative to Data.ImportExcel ) and Data.OpenXMLExportExcel (An alternative to Data.ExportToExcel ).
Now you may have raised your hand already: why do you guys make a new set of excel nodes? Well, because the old ones came with the following restrictions.
The legacy set of Excel nodes are depending on a local installation of MS Office
The MS Office installation needs to be 64bit version to maintain max compatibility with Dynamo node. We have seen cases that 32bit version does not work with legacy set of Excel nodes.
The MS Excel application will be launched when the Excel node runs. If for any reason this process fails, the execution of legacy set of Excel nodes fail. e.g. broken installation of Excel, license issue, version compatibility
The MS Excel application will be launched when the Excel node runs. This introduce performance bottleneck to your Dynamo workflow in a lot of the time. The time spent to launch Excel is much longer than data read/write usually.
The new set of nodes get rid of these restrictions by enabling users to interact with .xlsx files directly in Dynamo, regardless of whether or not you have MS Office installed or not. This should reduce the Dynamo setup pain and let users develop and share Dynamo workflows which work more universally. The new set of nodes will return True or False based on if the read/write action to file succeeded or not. These node also come with similar inputs and order. Our team also have new sample files created for them. Here is a screen shot of them.
Target path is read only or lack of permission through Dynamo, e.g. readonly path, path on a network drive or mapped path from OneDrive etc
You can try these new nodes out in Dynamo 2.12.0 sandbox release and our major integrators are on the way adopting it already. Hope this thread helps and we are also hear to listen to your feedback on the new nodes or any other issue you have. More exciting news are coming in our future releases and we will let you know soon.
Thatās true. I prefer CSV nodes to Excel nodes because they fail/freeze most of the time unexpectedly. Itās not good to rely on current Excel nodes when you share your workflow with other users.
@theshysnail CSV is great, unfortunately for me I often need to extract data which might include stray commas (feedback, comments etc.) which breaks itā¦ So I appreciate being able to use Excel.
I reinstalled both Office and any Autodesk product with a āclearunistallā. But Iām still having the same problem. Iām thinking of formatting the computer to see if that solves it.
Hi,
any ideas why Data.OpenXMLImportExcel node imports cell values and in some cases imports function+value? In excel no differece between the cells. .xlsx, Excel 2007(donāt askā¦-.-ā)
Iām not sure if I should start a new thread for this or not, but Iām having trouble with the Data.OpenXMLImportExcel node. Iām getting a warning āSpecified argument was out of the range of valid values. Parameter name: indexā. See image below. The old node is working fine (in this case) and reading the same file that the new node is throwing an error on.
Iām trying to understand what this means.
I had a theory that this error message was telling me the file was too big, but then I created a larger file with dummy data and it worked fine. I tried ābreakingā this new dummy Excel file by adding formulas, formatting, data validation, etc. But the OpenXML node reads all of this fine. So now Iām out of ideas. What is this error message trying to tell me?
@kovacsv hrm, first time Iāve seen this. 99% sure itās to do with the OpenXML library we are using and probably a bug on their side. We can look into it
@kovacsv weāve discussed and itās hard to tell without the Excel file you are working on, but we also donāt think OpenXML supports the use of formulas. Do other formula cells work correctly? The library itself is not using Excel at all, so wonāt have full parity support for all of Excelās functions.
If you are able to share your excel file here, then please do. If you wish it to be private, feel free to share on a DM
