Powershell - Reading Excel after formatting data - excel

Question

I have an excel file of new-hires for the company.
Firstly I need to hide all the columns that will be used for searching users.
That was pretty simple and I managed to do it. Now I'm left only with the columns I really need.
Now is the real problem:
I need to filter the data and then import those usernames to the PowerShell array.
So in excel it looks like this:
Then I have the function:
Function GetUsernames ($WorkSheet) {
$userName = $WorkSheet.UsedRange.Rows.Columns["UserNameColumn"].Value2
return $userName
}
But it's returning all of the records in the Username column - 651 records instead of 476.
The function is waiting for my input after I format the excel file manually.
Any directions will be appreciated! :)

Answer 1

What you seek is all the values from rows in a certain column that are not hidden in the Excel file.
To get those, you need to go through the Rows of the selected column.
In my Office version 2016, I cannot reference a column directly by its name, so I have extended your function to first find the column index.
Also, I have renamed the function a bit to follow the Verb-Noun convention in PowerShell
function Get-Usernames ($WorkSheet, $Column) {
# for me (office 2016) I cannot reference a Column by its name
# using Columns["UserNameColumn"], so I have to find the index first
$index = 0
if ($Column -is [int]) {
$index = $Column
}
else {
for ($col = 1; $col -le $WorkSheet.UsedRange.Columns.Count; $col++) {
$name = $WorkSheet.Cells.Item(1, $col).Value() # assuming the first row has the headers
if ($name -eq $Column) {
$index = $col
break
}
}
}
if ($index -gt 0) {
# now return the values in the columns for the rows that are not hidden
# skip the first row, because that is the column name itself
($WorkSheet.UsedRange.Rows.Columns($index).Rows | Select-Object -Skip 1 | Where-Object { !$_.hidden }).Value2
}
}
You can now use the function in your script like this:
$userNames = Get-Usernames $workbook.Worksheets(1) "UserNameColumn"