Output to Specific Range (Repaired & Read-only mode)

[Nelson_D]

Hi All,

I am trying to Write the file to Specific range through Output Tool, successfully i wrote to the file. But the when i open the excel it shows as Repaired file and opening as read only (Locked for editing) excel. Can someone help me how to resolve this issue?

[DanielG]

@Nelson_D - I am working through these issues right now too.  So I am going to keep an eye on this thread with you.  If you come up with anything good, can you post it.  If I do the same, I will also post it.  🙂  Thanks!!!

[Qiu]

@Nelson_D  @DanielG 
From my little experience, the Write to Range function is now working as it claims to be.

It seems to me that the above issue would occur when there is data on the left and upper sides of the target range of the Excel file.

[DanielG]

@Qiu  I am not sure I understand what you referring to with the left and upper sides?  If you reference the range it shouldnt matter what falls outside of that range because the data output isn't going to interact with those cells.

@Nelson_D - some things to check that I can across while searching the community previously.  I just dont know what posts they were in at this point.  1.) make sure there are no formulas being overwritten by the range you select.  I did see an issue with that once when I was trying things out on my end. 2.) In your range is 1000 rows and 25 columns (just random example) make sure you are always passing 1000 rows and 25 columns, even if you had to add blank rows to get to 1000.  I read this Community post here that to preserve formatting the entire named range or range in your case needs to be populated.  I am still trying to perfect this, but it keeps dropping a BAK file on me and I dont know if that is a good or bad thing.  🙂

As for my work, it involves 30 named ranges across a workbook with about 25 sheets, so I wont get into all the specifics with my stuff.  I want to see how we can solve @Nelson_D 's issue because I am sure I can apply it to all my instances.  🙂

[Nelson_D]

@DanielG  i tried all your above possibilities but it didnt work 😞 i even tried through Binary version but it say DataWrap2OleDb error.

[DanielG]

@Nelson_D  and @Qiu   -- just wanted to pass along additional information I just figured out after a long day of trail and error work on this.  But when you're file gets locked up like that it might actually have nothing to do with the data you are passing in from Alteryx to the range.  I had been scouring my data for special characters to find anything that could have thrown off the Excel XML causing the lock-outs that I had been getting.  It was cryptically showing information like this in the repair logs.  

What it turns out the issue was the name of the tab which included special characters, even though I am not altering the name of the tab anywhere in the workflow...  I had a tab name like "2b - blah & blah" and that was causing the issue even though it is perfectly fine to have that in Excel. 

Hoping that just maybe it gets @Nelson_D a little closer to fixing the original issue.

I will keep posting if I discover anything else.  🙂   

[DanielG]

PS - the start and end tags matched in my XML as far as I could tell.  I opened the Excel files as XML files using 7-zip file manager.