What is Excel Automation?
Working with Excels powerful and sophisticated tools enables you to create custom made spreadsheets which are simple to view, given Excel’s many advanced features like charting, graphing and calculating capabilities. From corporate organizations to small companies, there is a continuous need to access, analyze, manipulate and report real time data easily and quickly. Users gather requisite data to prepare detailed analysis and reports via Excel spreadsheets. However, to manually assemble and edit such quantitative data using spreadsheets is not only time consuming but also quite cumbersome. Also, it is not possible to integrate Excel between applications to retrieve specific data. To deal with such issues and essentially reduce manual errors when handling databases, automate Excel. Automation Anywhere makes it tremendously easy to work with simple and complex data in Excel. With Automation Anywhere you can use Excel’s features to an optimum so that reliable and error-free data is available for analysis in real time.
Ways to automate Excel:
Excel has inbuilt macros that can be used to automate Excel. But these macros are inherent to Excel and cannot be used for data transfers from different applications. In addition writing Excel macros also requires programming knowledge. While selecting and evaluating a suitable automation solution for total Excel automation, it is important to choose a product that understands and responds to the users needs even if the user is devoid of any programming knowledge. Automation Anywhere provides solutions for Excel Automation that is totally user friendly.
The Automation Anywhere advantage of Excel Automation:
By using Automation Anywhere, you can create spreadsheets, retrieve required data, go to specified cells or worksheets, delete specified cells, run excel macros, compare data, remove duplicates without errors , sort data and do much more. Easy to use drag and drop tools from the Task Editor enable you to perform powerful automated actions.
Advantages of automating Excel with Automation Anywhere
1. You can enable easy data transfer or data migration from any database into Excel or vice versa. Automation Anywhere allows you to query the database, so that you can access and carry out complex data transfer into Excel where you can further automate spreadsheet editing properties.
2. You can also extract tabular data from the web like competitor pricing, stock updates etc. and transfer your saved .csv database into Excel for further editing.
3. By automating Excel, you can compare data between cells and/or delete data cells based on specific criteria.
4. You can automatically fill web forms with data from your Excel spreadsheets with just a click instead of repeating the same procedure numerous times.
5. You can also automate Excel macros to run as a part of a fully automated sequence.
6. Scheduling automated tasks through Automation Anywhere to run at pre-defined times helps automate business processes by providing error-free data transfers.
How to automate Excel using Automation Anywhere?
The following example illustrates how to transfer data from Access into Excel.
Task Description: Transfers product data from Access to Excel using Excel automation.
Automation Anywhere Solution:
1. Connect to database
- Create a new task by selecting New -->Task Editor.
- From Commands select Applications --> Database, For our example let us use MS Access as the database, but other databases like Oracle, SQL Server, My SQL, MS SQL, etc. may also be used.
- Select SQL Query option from Database tab and specify the query. e.g. select * from Products. When the query is executed, it will return all the data of the product table.
- From Commands select Applications -->Excel, Select Open Spreadsheet option.
- Insert the commands to paste the data from the database into the Excel spreadsheet.
- The commands for pasting data into Excel are:
- Excel : Go to beginning of the row of the active cell
- Excel : Set value of Active Cell with "$Dataset Column(1)$"
- Excel : Go to one cell right of active cell
2. Open Spreadsheet
3. Transfer Data
Repeat above commands for each column of the access database. Insert a loop for each row of the database.
After the task runs the Excel spreadsheet will contain the product data
When you run this task, it reads the values from a database and inserts them one by one into the Excel spreadsheet. You can run this task as many times as you wish.
Access to accurate updated data along with the added advantage of realizing a quick ROI due to reduced man hours and increased reliability makes Automation Anywhere a most user friendly tool for Excel where simple and complex data is regularly monitored and analyzed.
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