Getting alteryx to read in from a word doc.

[rpelanotreasaigh]

Hi Everyone,

I'm currently designing a workflow that would build a .pdf letter. 

However, certain text body's change due to adjustments in T&C's 

I'm trying to figure out a way to have a file on a shared location to be able to be updated by an external user. 

Which will then be read in by Alteryx when it is ran. 

Any help or ideas would be massively appreciated. 

[danilang]

Hi @rpelanotreasaigh 

You're limited in what formats Alteryx will read.  About the only one suitable is txt.  Save the T&C as a .txt file and then read the file as csv with \n as the delimiter.  You can merge this with the boilerplate text.

One thing to note is the Input tool removes leading spaces from lines in csv and txt files.  If this causes an issue, use a Blob Input tool followed by a Blob Convert.

Dan    

[TheOC]

hey @rpelanotreasaigh 

Your best bet would be looking at the python tool. 

I have built and attached something that will work as a proof of concept. Using the texttract python library, i can select my document to read the text from, and this will output to the first output of the python tool.

You will have to go into the code of the python tool, and manually change the location of the file:

You can also supply the location of the file into the python tool, making it dynamic. This will require some changes made to the python tool, but If this solution works for you, and you would like some help with that, I'm happy to help on that one too!


Hope this helps!
TheOC