Claus Topholt
Driving automation in Leapwork with pre-defined data from an Excel file is easy with the Read Excel block. But sometimes you need more real-time access.
For instance, if you routinely change the data in the Excel file before running your automation cases, re-adding the file every time can be cumbersome. The changes can even be made by other people in your organization who are not involved in the automation process.
You may also want to write results or other data back to the Excel file for further processing later. For instance, you can update the same Excel file every day with more and more results and even use it as a human-readable format for exchanging data between different systems.
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The following is an example of how Excel files can be used as a live data source in Leapwork and how to read and write to it using a Database block with an ODBC connection.
Using an ODBC connection to Excel (or a csv- or txt-file for that matter) can be a powerful way to read, manipulate and write data.
The ODBC query syntax can unfortunately be somewhat confusing, and documentation from Microsoft is sparse.
The following are a few links to articles and blog posts where the Excel ODBC driver is discussed:
- Getting Data Between Excel and SQL Server Using ODBC
- Using Excel as an ODBC Database
- Excel ODBC Insert Problem
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