AutoHotkey Community

vahju · Joined: 17 Feb 2008 Posts: 296

Total newb at COM and MS Office Automation Functions.

Searching through the forums I got the feeling that the excel file has to be open (visible or hidden) in order to get the data.

I need to pull a range of cells in the same column into a variable. This contains a list of last names. Once I have the list of names in a variable then I am good to go manipulating it.

This data is going to be pulled daily by 25 people so trying to avoid having all of them open the xls file each time the list of names are searched.

Leef_me · Posted: Fri Jan 15, 2010 7:29 am Post subject:

I foun this, perhaps it will be helpful.
http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic29429.html

Some say you can get datafrom a file without opening it through DDE, but I have the (untested) idea that "without opening it" is a semantic term.

If you want the data available in a simpler form for the people, why not save it as CSV (comma separated values) format?

AHK can read this format easily.

kdoske · Joined: 17 Dec 2008 Posts: 80

I had a similar problem and I just saved the excel file to a .xml within excel.

Then i just used the xml function found on this website to pull out the data i needed from the file.

If its a company file you may not be able to change the file type for various reasons but if you can it really makes it easy. You could also alternately convert it to a .csv file.

hd0202 · Joined: 13 Aug 2006 Posts: 265 Location: Germany

I save the excel file as a csv-file and extract then the data from the csv-file:

vahju · Joined: 17 Feb 2008 Posts: 296

Thanks everyone for you quick responses. Seems the general consensus is convert to CSV. hd0202 thanks for the code. I will play around this weekend and post my result.

Original file was not created by me otherwise I would have just started with CSV.

Thanks again.