Trying to prepare a review workflow

[Harish0422]

Hello, 

I am trying to prepare a review workflow which will help me my present excel formatting an each column matching the requirements. For example : if column A needs 3 decimal places, the workflow should review input file and give me an error notification or mark the cell in an colour. In the same way for every column review can be done and cells can be marked. Is this possible on Alteryx. ?  

[Luke_C]

Hi @Harish0422 

This mighttt be more trouble than it's worth in Alteryx, why not use conditional formatting in excel for this?

[Harish0422]

Thank you for your response. I have tried with excel VBA but looking for an alternative solution as there are many drawbacks for the issue. Also, I am planning to connect it to Power BI by creating a dashboard. Please let me know if there is an Alteryx solution for this. 

[Luke_C]

@Harish0422 Others may have thoughts on this, but my initial reaction is it would probably be straightforward enough to create a validation report that shows what the issues are. The reporting tools have conditional formatting capabilities, but would output/render to a new file. I'm personally not aware of an way to change cell highlighting in an existing worksheet without calling some external script.

[danilang]

Hi @Harish0422 

The initial issue with this is that the values read from an Excel worksheet into Alteryx are read preformat, i.e. if the value is 1.23456 in excel but formatted to display as 1.23, it will still show up as 1.2345 in Alteryx.  

There is a way that you can read the formatting from an excel file, but the process is not trivial.  It involves open the excel file as a zip file and examining the inner xml files to find the formatting instructions.  See the "Xml read document.yxmd" in this post for an example.   You can use this link as a starting point to figure out where the formatting information is stored. 

Dan