How to automate testing for excel apps?

Questions
#1

Hi There,

I need your help, guys, if anybody has ever come across something similar!

We have a project that is mainly developed as an excel app, which we need to test and of course there is lots of data and functionality, and we want and need to generate some automated scrips for testing at least part of that logic. The problem is, we only allowed to use implement something with Selenium, due to the company’s policy.

Has anybody tried anything or used some libraries (we’re currently using .net) that can be integrated with selenium to interact with excel files?
Any ideas or suggestions are welcome! and Thank you for reading this!

#2

Hello @ana.sarbescu!

You may be able to reference the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel DLL if it is installed with your version of Visual Studio. Through that DLL, you may be able to execute individual macros and inspect the worksheet for data.

If I may offer an opinion, evaluating the Excel application is the easier part of your challenge. The larger challenge is the constraint on testing within the company. While I might understand some good reasons for selecting an automation tool, limiting a team to a single tool impacts their career growth and may reduce that team’s contribution to a project. Testing needs to be free to explore multiple solutions for testing challenges.

Joe

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#3

Spreadsheets are important business tools but expecting the same rigor as a database or a web application is asking for trouble. I know there are probably thousands of businesses in the world that make do with spreadsheets and MS access but its asking for a lot of pain.Selenium wouldn’t help here unless it was a web version.As Joe mentioned there are a lot of .net options even robotic process automation as well. It’s worth complaining this is not the right tool if it is important to the business.

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#4

Oh Joe, don’t get me started on that! :slight_smile: i completely know and understand what you’re talking about and it’s a frustration that keeps growing. We’ve had a proof of concept for this with UiPath but it hasn’t been approved from not well explained reasons. But hey! this is also some sort of exploration and research ahaha!

Thank you for your suggestion, much appreciated! will look into it!

#5

Hello @ana.sarbescu!

I’l return to the topic so that we both aren’t “started”, but I suspected that you were fighting the good fight. There are many in this forum that share your plight and would rise to assist in helping define what testing means to an enterprise and its value to be independent. I struggle to understand why the pattern repeats in the face of great advice here, at conferences, and other testing sites.

Back to our regularly scheduled topic…

UiPath is an RPA tool. While others in the Club have suggested the use of RPA tools, I’m hesitant to recommend them. In my opinion, the support and maintenance makes them challenging to use as a testing tool.

Another idea for the Excel product is to instrument the code driving the worksheet. That is, add code in a separate worksheet to call the code in the product worksheet. This would depend how modular the product worksheet was designed.

Joe

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#6

Yes, i am aware of the limitations of using an RPA tool for testing purposes but we’re trying to also take into consideration more aspects (among which, the skill of the testers in the team, that might not be the best programmers). But in the end we’re considering your initial suggestion and try to manipulate the excel directly from a custom framework, using Interop.

However, it’s a long way and continuous fight to change the ways of an organization and it goes step by step. Usually it’s not a problem that people don’t know, but it’s applying that knowledge and succeed. And that takes a bit of struggle and time. Thank you and all the other people for your support, to us and any other teams that go through the struggle!

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