How to parse individual excel files from a directory in Powershell

Question

I am brand new to powershell. I've been trying to accomplish one seemly simple thing for hours. I'd really appreciate some help.

I have a gigantic list of folders and sub-folders full of Microsoft excel files *.xlsm that I would like to retrieve specific cell data from.

$Excel_files = (gci C:\Users\xxx\xxx\ -Recurse -File *.xlsm).FullName
foreach($getname in $Excel_files)
{
$Excel = New-Object -ComObject Excel.Application
$readbook = $Excel.WorkBooks.Open($Excel_files)
$readsheet = $readbook.WorkSheets.Item("SHEET NAME")
$Excel.Visible = $false
$getname = $readsheet.Cells.Item(8,3)
return $getname.text
}

Am I on the right track?

The intent of this is to pull the name, date, description from a couple thousand *.xlsm files and put them into a new separate sheet.

I appreciate any help, thanks.

Answer 1

You're generally on the right track, except you shouldn't use return in your loop body, as that will not only exit the loop but the enclosing function / script altogether.

Also, it is inefficient to create a new Excel instance in every loop iteration.

A refactored version of your code:

# Determine the target workbooks' sheet name and cell address to extract.
$targetSheet = 'SHEET NAME'
$row = 8
$col = 3

# Create the Excel instance *once*.
$xl = New-Object -ComObject Excel.Application

# Loop over all workbooks of interest and extract the information of interest
# and collect the values in array $cellVals
# (There is no strict need for this intermediate step; omit `$cellValues = `
#  to output the values directly.)
$cellVals = Get-ChildItem C:\Users\xxx\xxx -File -Recurse -Filter *.xlsm | ForEach-Object {
  $wb = $xl.WorkBooks.Open($_.fullName)
  # Output the cell value of interest.
  $wb.WorkSheets($targetSheet).Cells($row, $col).text
  $wb.Close()
}

# Output the collected cell values.
$cellVals