Having trouble running an Excel script. Flow says it did, but it really didn't.

Susan Walters

Hi Alex, I know this isn't directly RE related, but I'm trying to develop a flow that writes to an Excel file. I need to run an Excel script that moves the most recently created worksheet to the first position, so I can write to it. In Excel, the script works just fine and does what it's supposed to. In my flow, I don't get any errors, but it's not actually running the script. I tried setting up a second flow, just to run the script, and it's not working either. Any ideas?

Alex Wong

@Susan Walters
I used to use Excel Script a lot in PA when I was combining excel csv data from SFTP download into one report. They run without issue. I don't SFTP anymore (Query API replaced that), but do still use excel script for “formatting”. I have a “commonformat” script that format the excel as table and “proper” auto-width the table, and they are running without issue also. That said, what I mean to say is running excel script from PA is working, not a system-wide MS issue. That is always important to make sure first.

So to diagnose this, you will first have to determine if your script got “called” or not. You can use “console.log()” to return a log message to the calling PA flow. You can add this as the first line of script and subsequently other places after some operation is done.

Here's a good article on troubleshooting excel script

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/testing/troubleshooting

You can also paste here your script and I can help take a look