MS Excel VBO

[RajathGopal]

Hello,
So we have recently migrated to BP 6.9 and I see there is an issue with MS Excel VBO. It is unable to open excel workbook using [Open Workbook] action. However I am using the same code in BP 6.4 it works perfectly fine. 

I also tried creating a workbook in BP 6.9 and then opening the same and it fails. 
Could you please have a check and let me know if there is an issue with the MS Excel VBO provided by BP ? 

The error that I get when I try opening the workbook is: Could not execute code stage because exception thrown by code stage. Exception has been thrown by target of invocation.

The input has been passed perfectly fine with the path being entered in the ""

I tried opening an excel using the OLEDB that works fine but not the MS Excel VBO so need your help to understand what the issue is and is this an issue already in the BP 6.9 that is known?


Thanks In Advance

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Rajath Gopal
Associate IT Consultant
ITC Infotech
Asia/Kolkata
8904867411
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[JamesMan]

The list of known issues can be seen from here:
http://portal.blueprism.com/customer-support/support-center#/path/1535133752
I don't see anything resembling your issue in that list.  

Maybe you can provide the simplest sample excel and process xml that you can, to trigger the error, upload it here and others can try to reproduce it?

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James Man
Professional Services
Blue Prism
Asia/Hong_Kong
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[nobu]

Hi Rajath,

"Open Workbook" action should work in v6.9.0. 

Just in case, I created a sample process in v6.4.0 and copied the process to v6.9.0. And I used the same version of Excel VBO for each environment. Both of them worked fine. The test process is quite simple to check "Open Workbook" action like below.

I'm sharing the test processes for your to check.

If you still have the problem, please share the process for us to check in our environment. 

Cheers,

Nobu

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Nobuhiro Tokushige
Product Specialist
Blue Prism
Australia/Sydney
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[Walter.Koller]

This issues seems to be related to culture settings in Excel.
See this article for some details: 
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/vsto/globalization-and-localization-of-excel-solutions?redirectedfrom=MSDN&view=vs-2019
By default, Office solutions that you create by using Visual Studio are not affected by the end user's locale settings, and always behave as though the locale is English (United States).

This happens when Windows and Office/Excel do have different language settings. Unfortunately I cannot recall the exact scenario. For most of our robots workplaces the first thing we do is to set EN-US for OS and Office.

I have amended the default Excel VBO coming with Blue Prism to set culture when creating a new Excel instance. This solved this type of problems in 6.4.
In 6.9 it seems to become a little more complicated since Blue Prism language settings may play a role too.  We work in a mixed language environment with combination of English and German.

This works just fine in 6.4 but in 6.9...

BP language	Default Excel VBO	Amended Excel BO
Windows default	OK	OK
EN-UK	Not OK	OK
EN-US	OK	OK

Hope this helps

Edit:
Just reviewed some of our references to this topic and found some updated documentation here:
https://help.blueprism.com/Automation-Design/Studio/Visual-Business-Objects/1211660442/How-do-I-change-the-Culture-information-for-a-VBO.htm

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Walter Koller
Solution Manager
Erste Group IT International GmbH
Europe/Vienna
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[MarcoMatuttis1]

Does this also work when I just attach to an open excel instance ?

In my case I use the SAP Export function which opens an Excel instance and I just use the MS Excel VBO - Attach Action to work with the Excel output

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Marco Matuttis
Robot Process Automation Developer
INTER Krankenversicherung AG
Mannheim
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