A lot of issues working with Excel Reader on KNIME 5.5. Terrible new version! My workflow stopped to work.

[EmanuelTavares]

Hi!

Today, I was surprised by issues with an old workflow that had been working really well. Until now, I have spent 4 hours working to fix it.

The problem is behaviour changes on the EXCEL READER node.

One of the files has a column NOTES with possible \n and the actual EXCEL READER stops during the process.

The workaround was to remove the lines with ‘n’ and consider how to handle them later.

However, it is worse.

When I opened the node to verify, it lost the configuration. As I’m not using all the Excel file columns, I need to unmark one by one the undesired columns.

This process is extremely slow because for each column, the node reprocesses the content list below the fields list. I tried reducing the number of lines read to 10, but it didn’t work. Still slow, and Excel has 62 columns! I need just 20.

This is absolutely frustrating.

[EmanuelTavares]

Complementing:

Changing data types on the Transformation tab is equally complicated. I changed one column and inadvertently affected another unrelated column.

I have a large project based on files sent by clients in Excel and CSV formats. I read these files and inject the data into a BigQuery database.

Everything is going down.

Thanks for the terrible weekend.

[DanielBog]

Hey @EmanuelTavares,

I am really sorry to hear that the Excel Reader seems to have ruined your weekend. I totally get the frustration. Rest assured that we will investigate and make sure that something like this will not happen again.
I tried to reproduce your problem, but I am currently unable to reproduce the issue.
I tried multiple Excel files that contain \n in various variations, but so far the excel reader works as expected. Is there anything special that you observed other than the inclusion of a \n character?
Would you maybe be able to share a minimal version of that problematic excel sheet?

Greetings,
Daniel

[EmanuelTavares]

Hi Daniel,

Thank you for your attention.

I can send you a sample in private, but this image shows the result of the situation.

The Excel Reader read the file, but put the values in the wrong columns, so the result was column type errors.

[mlauber71]

@EmanuelTavares what you could do is try to import Excel sheet with Python/OpenPyxl and see if that does work.

Import Excel File with OpenPyxl (simple) – mlauber71