File Converter for Microsoft Excel, Word

This custom activity converts Excel and Word files using the COM Interop library.

An activities pack that converts files between various formats.

It receives as parameters the file path of the original file, the path of the folder where the new file should be created and the name of the new converted file.

Currently, the package contains the following activities:

• Convert DOC to DOCX
• Convert DOCX to DOC
• Convert Word to PDF
• Convert XLS to XLSX
• Convert XLSX to XLS

Input

• FilePath(string) - path of the file that we're going to convert.
• Directory To Save In(string) - path of the folder where we're going to save the new file.
• New File Name(string) - the name of the newly created file.

Output

• Resulting FilePath (string) - file path of the newly created file.

How To Use

Example - Convert XLS to XLSX:

First, we input the full file path for the .xls file, we specify the destination folder and the name of the new file.

Then, we proceed to read and process the file as normal.

The resulting file will be "C:\UiPath\ResultXLSX.xslx".

Observation and limitations:

• Because of the usage of COM Interop, it means that this activity requires that the Office application is installed to successfully convert the file.
• It is possible that converting XLS and/or Word files will not work for extremely large files.

By converting the files to a different format we can reduce their size making them easier to store/send as attachments/process (XLS => XLSX; DOC =>DOCX).

We increase the number of options we have for processing the file (XLS => XLSX; DOC =>DOCX - we can process them by reading the xml files inside the resulting docx;xlsx files).

We make them readable without having to have Office (WORD => PDF).

We can make them readable as plain text (XLSX => XLS; DOCX => DOC).