Plugins - Excel tools

Hi mohamedb, There are 2 smart services - Export CDT To Excel, Export SQL to Excel - which comes with Excel Tools Shared Component itself. These 2 smart services have the ability to write to specific cells, through configuring the parameters - Cell_Keys & Cell_Values (considering the business requirement) - under Data/Inputs tab.
Coming to your second question, I think there is no such provision through any shared component.

You can also upload an excel template with multiple sheets and various formatting to then write into. There are two different services. One that will only write to specific cells or Export CDT To Excel plugin which can write to specific cells or perform a multi column/row data dump beginning at a specific cell.

Thanks, I thought there might be a way to do it without the need to create a special CDT. But, that works.

Do you know of anyway to add/delete xls tabs from within Appian?

Can not predict all possible template combinations I have to create ...

I don't know of a way to add/delete tabs. If you find one, would you mind commenting here? Mine is a limited case I suppose, I'm using 14 different templates..

Using the XML Spreadsheet format you can create anything you want. Check the URL below. You can simply create a file in Excel, save it as XML Spreadsheet and modify it in any text editor to include placeholders. Then use some text functions to add any data.

@stefanh791: Thanks for all the input.

I understand you want to use XML spreadsheet format over the XLS document format due to the limited out of the box functionality we have in Appian when dealing with XLS documents?

Attached is an example of the XML spreadsheet format. It does not look simple at all. As Microsoft documentation states "This content is no longer actively maintained. It is provided as is, for anyone who may still be using these technologies, with no warranties or claims of accuracy with regard to the most recent product version or service release."

Also, imagine that we need to parse this XML data (that can change in the future upgrades) in Expression Language or even worse , to perform text manipulation on that XML file in Appian to update data!

Terrible design.

Book1.xlsx

Book1_xml.xml

I agree that this format might not be supported forever. But to create a nice looking freestyle Excel file for users this could still be a solution. I do not recommend this for parsing.