Excel files stay locked after write process completes

Question

Hello,

I have been browsing the community for answers to my problem, but none of the responses seemed to have solved the issue. My team frequently encounters an issue where Alteryx writes data to multiple worksheets of the same Excel workbook and upon process completion, the Excel file remains locked indefinitely. Our IT HelpDesk is not able to even kill the connection to the Excel file. We have tried all of the following:

1. Changed complicated file types such as XLSM and XLSB to a simple XLSX

2. Ensured that the files are trusted in the Excel Trust Center settings

3. Added block until done options into the workflow so that data is written into each worksheet one at a time

We cannot move away from Excel unfortunately and need to have the data available in Excel. We also need the users to modify the file. This is currently causing a ton of pain. Does anybody have any other ideas? Below are the error messages we get when we open the file.

NicoleJohnson · Accepted Answer

I have frequently suffered this same issue - I know the pain!!

The solution I've found that seems to work the best is to actually use the Parallel Block Until Done tool (part of the CreW Macro toolkit that can be downloaded here). There is an explanation of the difference between Block Until Done & Parallel Block Until Done in this post - @MarqueeCrew provides a good comparison of the differences and when one might work better than the other. The Parallel Block Until Done tool should allow you to specify which tab gets written to first, and subsequent workflow activities/outputs will not begin until that first output is complete... you can chain them together as well, if you're writing to more than 2 tabs, and the flexibility of this one means that you can feed in different branches of data into the tool, instead of only having one input branch like Block Until Done.

Give that a try and let us know if you continue to have problems writing to different tabs in the same file?

Cheers,

NJ