How will Grooper Render a Multi-Tab Excel Spreadsheet

tmartin

I have a customer that receives excel spreadsheets via email. These spreadsheets contain 1 to many tabs. Is there a way to make each tab a page within a parent document in Grooper?

RandoCalrisian

Natively, no.  Grooper has to render Excel spreadsheets.  Rendering is what would happen if you opened the document and clicked File > Print to PDF.  The result of the default settings of the print is what you'd get as a document in Grooper as a PDF.

You may want to reach out to our Client Fulfillment team as I believe they've made some custom scripts that allow something close to what you're looking for.
You may also want to ask them about functionality behind getting the data out of the spreadsheet as a .csv text file that Grooper could consume natively as a text file, and do simple pattern matching from there.

GrooperGuru

I've seen a few different custom scripts that take different approaches to solving this problem. Neither involves the use of a Grooper Render printer. I'll summarize each below.

The first script from @Brian essentially piggy backs off the "Print to pdf" functionality that exists within Excel natively. There are options for how multipile sheets should be handled... Either all as one big output PDF or as individual sub-documents for each sheet. It also gives you control over output resolution and scaling, similar to what you have in Excel when choosing to print the file.

The other is from @jgodwin. This one takes an approach of converting each sheet of the excel file to a .CSV file. In most cases, extraction can easily be performed from the .CSV file and the visual characteristics of the worksheet aren't really relevant. I've heard rumors that a flavor of this custom activity will become out of the box Grooper functionality in a future release, but I can't speak to the specifics or the ETA at this time.

tmartin

Thanks for your feedback. My ultimate goal was to find out if it could be done, and you have helped me answer that question. 

dearner

Also worth noting: improved office integration is on our roadmap, and is about to enter active development.