Reading and writing data within Excel worksheets

Working with data using Excel is a key part of most business roles. Having the ability to automate tasks using Excel can free substantial time from our daily routine. The following walk-throughs will look at reading datasets from Excel followed by writing data to Excel. Like the previous chapter, we will be adding new steps at each stage to make our bot more structured.

Reading from Excel worksheets

Data in Excel is usually presented as a table, which means it consists of a fixed set of columns with each row as a record or transaction. The sample data file has a worksheet named Catalog. The dataset looks like this:

Figure 11.7 – Excel Catalog worksheet dataset

In this walk-through, we want our bot to read each record and show the Title and Price in a message box. To read the record, we need a Record type variable, which will be named recBook. Once a record is assigned to a Record type variable...