Delete excel rows based on a specific value with Powershell [closed] - excel

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I found some similar solutions to my issue here, but they do not exactly cover my problem and since I'm still very new to Powershell, I couldn't modify them specifically for my use case. Therefore I have a question.
I am making a weekly manual Excel export (.xlsx) from a system, which doesn't offer any filtering options. The result is a table with around 500 entries.
My goal here is to write a powershell script, which automatically deletes/removes ALL rows, containing a value DIFFERENT from "01.01.2099" in the "Valid until" column (F1 in the Excel-Sheet).
I still haven't written any code, since I'm not sure where or how to start here. I'm sure this is a very simple task and any help from a more experienced Powersheller will be highly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

The biggest challenge here is that you need to test if a cell contains a certain date value or not.
From your image, you can see the dates are formatted in different ways, so comparing the cell's value to a date in a specific format is tricky.
Luckily, the DateTime object has a static method FromOADate() that can do the conversion for you.
Also, you need to delete rows from bottom to top row, otherwise by deleting a row, the index of the ones below that is changed because they all move up one row.
$file = 'D:\Test\Export.xlsx'
# create a datetime variable to chack against
$checkDate = [datetime]::new(2099, 1, 1) # or do (Get-Date -Year 2099 -Month 1 -Day 1).Date
$excel = New-Object -ComObject Excel.Application
$excel.Visible = $false
# open the Excel file
$workbook = $excel.Workbooks.Open($file)
$sheet = $workbook.Worksheets.Item(1)
# get the number of rows in the sheet
$rowMax = $sheet.UsedRange.Rows.Count
# loop through the rows to test if the value in column 6 is date 01/01/2099
# do the loop BACKWARDS, otherwise the indices will change on every deletion.
for ($row = $rowMax; $row -ge 2; $row--) {
# convert the formatted date in the cell to real DateTime object with time values set all to 0
# Column 6 is the 'Valid until' column
$cellDate = [datetime]::FromOADate($sheet.Cells.Item($row, 6).Value2).Date
if ($cellDate -ne $checkDate) {
$null = $sheet.Rows($row).EntireRow.Delete()
}
}
# save and exit
$workbook.Close($true)
$excel.Quit()
# clean up the COM objects used
$null = [System.Runtime.Interopservices.Marshal]::ReleaseComObject($sheet)
$null = [System.Runtime.Interopservices.Marshal]::ReleaseComObject($workbook)
$null = [System.Runtime.Interopservices.Marshal]::ReleaseComObject($excel)
[System.GC]::Collect()
[System.GC]::WaitForPendingFinalizers()
In the above code, the column index is hardcoded to be 6
If you aren't sure about that, but do know the columns name, you can insert this snippet:
# get the column index for column named 'Valid until'
$colMax = $sheet.UsedRange.Columns.Count
for ($col = 1; $col -le $colMax; $col++) {
if ($sheet.Cells.Item(1, $col).Value() -eq 'Valid until') { break } # assuming the first row has the headers
}
above the $rowMax = $sheet.UsedRange.Rows.Count line and inside the loop change $sheet.Cells.Item($row, 6).Value2 into $sheet.Cells.Item($row, $col).Value2