Need for MS Excel to be loaded?

[nbd66m4]

This may seem liken obvious question. I run compares of Excel files on my workstation and thdey run fine. However, if I run same compare from our server it fails as it cannot create the excel.application object. I'm guessing this is because we are not allowed to install MS Office products on servers.

We get a Windows Script Host error cannot create activeX script error on ...\Helpers\XLS_to_CVS.vbs

Is there a work around to this? Very inconvenient.

[Aaron]

Unfortunately there is not a workaround. To view the contents of an Excel file in BC3, we need to run that .vbs script, which uses the local copy of Excel to open the .XLS files and save them back out as a temporary .txt file for comparison purposes. BC3 then uses the temp file for the comparison so you need a copy of Excel installed to perform the conversion.

You can run a binary scan on any file type, without viewing the contents, but otherwise you will need to save the files in a plain text format such as .CSV instead of .XLS to compare on your server.

If you are familiar with any other program which can perform the conversion, BC3 can use it in a similar way. We have details on how to customize External Conversions within a format, here:
http://www.scootersoftware.com/suppo...rnalconversion
This example is specific to RESX files, but the process is similar to any other file type or program used.

[nbd66m4]

Couldn't you just use an OpenXML SDK (or even make life easy and use ASPose) bit of code to do this Excel to CVS conversion?

I will look into creating a down-n-dirty .Net ASPose program that takes Excel path in and Text path output file of just the data values. But it would be very convenient if yo guys put this in under the covers. Even MS does not support Excel on servers.

[Aaron]

That certainly sounds like a great idea. It's something we would need to investigate.

If you'd like to email us with any conversion you would like to submit, we'd be glad to review it. Many of our additional downloads and conversions have either come from or are influenced by user submissions.

Our email is [email protected] and please include a link to this forum thread for our reference.

[nbd66m4]

I finally got time. Our group uses a standard batch template, and we code in VB.Net so we use ASPose.Cells for .Net. My program runs as a standalone console app, and has much more housekeeping baggage than use guys need, plus I have a number of optional parms to support single file in/file out or *.xlsm options. All my files just have 1 sheet.

The actual ASPose code is simple - for single sheet files:
1. Create object instance.
2. Set license.
3. Open Excel file.
4. Save as CSV file.