Issue with xls control table generator

[Chris_F]

Hi there,

Sorry if this sounds trivial but I am just starting with xls formatting and I face one issue and have a question.
I could find some tutorial arguing about the benefit of using the following series: control Table generator (unpivot)-Rule Edit- Control table generator (Pivot) to efficiently tag tables. According to what I have read, the second Control Table Generator node should understand that the input is already a control Table and therefore pivoting back should lead to the original table format with tags in the cells. However in my case, it looks like this second Control Table Generator node treated the input flow as an ordinary table and therefore doesn’t return anything useful to me. Can someone tell me what I do wrong ?

The question is: I have Knime 3.7.2 (latest release available in my company). I have an Excel file with multiple sheets required a different format: can you confirm that with this Knime version, I won’t be able to format all sheets and that the best I can get is the format of only one sheet ?

Thanks to all the community for the support

[Chris_F]

I could see that @arbe was able to answer issues with the Control Table Generator in the past. I hope he ( or anyone else) can also help this time

[arbe]

Hi @Chris_F ,

Yes, I’ll try my best to help. Your understanding is absolutely correct: The 2nd Control Table Generator recognizes that special input table. For that, it would be helpful to get the screenshots of the 2nd tab of the table view: the column specificiation. If I remember correctly, the function recognizing the special table layout does not look into the cell values but the column header only. You could verify yourself that you delete all potential extra columns that you add between the 2 applications of this node.

To your second question: It’s your lucky day, the XLS Formatting functionality can give all sheets of a single file different formatting instructions! You need a Sheet Selector and merge the formats then, which is documented in this tutorial: https://www.knime.com/community/continental-nodes-for-knime-xls-formatter

Best regards

Arne

[Chris_F]

Hi Arne,

Thanks for your reply. I think I could find the answer…at least the explanation of my issue. It is related to a post you contributed to : continental-installation-xls-extension.

I probably have a low version of the continental node, which doesn’t enable to get back to the pivoted table: .
So I am afraid that I am stuck with that as long as my company doesn’t upgrade the continental node package unfortunately, which is quite limiting…and I guess this is exactly the same for the XLS formatting functionality you are refering to !