Creating a workflow that checks a spreadsheet for strikethrough characters

Question

Hi Alteryx community,

I am doing some investigating whether it is possible to leverage alteryx to search a workflow that has merged and unmerged cells for characters that have been striked through as well has specific color text. I have not built a workflow so I apologize that I do not have an example to give physically. I can describe what I am looking for here in this post to the best of my ability and I am of course willing to respond to follow up questions.

The example I can give is as follows, let say for example this table below is a spreadsheet it contains cells that are merged and unmerged and within those cell is text that is stricken through or colored another color to get the users attention to either a word being added or changed. I want to build a workflow that will Identify if there are characters that are stricken through or color a different color other than black front.

So here is how the spreadsheet could obviously this is way dumbed down version. Any ideas on how to accomplish this would be greatly appreciated, even if it's just a starting point I will take any help I can get.

Thank you in advance.

-Avidan Rothman

These two cells are merged   example of a strikethrough These two cellsare merged for the examples 997           text example             This is colored to point out a grammar change texts here is another examples

AZuc · Answer

@Arothman12 it is possible although tricky.

First take a look on that answer about colors (not using python). It will describe a little about internal xlsx structure https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Delete-columns-based-on-color/m-p/842727#M207530

You can identify the strikes taking a look on  xl/SharedStrings.xml (at least for strikes that takes part of the cell)

Let me show you an example

Let me try to find the definition for C2

Cell definition is in xl/worksheets/sheet1.xml

"C2" is the cell and "50" points to xl/sharedStrings.xml, that stores all the strings in the workbook. Strings are stored by position, 50 means the 50th entry in the list.

going to xl/sharedStrings.xml, I see

This is what happens when Excel stores a partial struck text. It's different when it strikes the whole cell (I believe there is a font definition for this case).

So, answering about "if it can be done", the answering is yes, and about "how" you need to go deeper in the excel structure.

Arothman12 · Answer

@mceleavey wrote:Hi @Arothman12 ,

Not that I'm aware. This is not the actual data but a visual, so you would need to pull in the stylesheets as you would with determining the colour of the cell.

You can read an article by @WilliamR  HERE on how to pull in colours, you will need to adapt the Python to pick up strikethrough characters rather than cell colouring, but the principle will be the same.

Obviously, the advise here is to capture the data correctly rather than using Excel visuals (or stop using Excel, obviously).

The article is in French but Google should convert it if your French is as bad as mine 🙂

Hope this helps,

M.