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How to write to Excel table with new 2025.2 writer

  • January 14, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 79 views

andrew_r
Contributor
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Has anyone had success with using the updated 2025.2 Excel writer to write data to a table in Excel?  I see that this idea was implemented with 2025.2:  Excel Writer: Explicit Table Support | Community

However, the instructions for the writer don’t go into a lot of detail on how to have the writer create a new table on a sheet and load it with the incoming data.

I personally tried to follow some of the older demo’s that walk throughs for writing to a named range.  Those walkthroughs require you to create a template xlsx file with the named range already created.  So for my 2025.2 test, I create a new template.xlsx file, then created a table named tData on Sheet1.  The table is blank.  

After that I created some dummy data in FME and tried to write it to a new excel file using the template.  The output excel file does load the dummy data onto the sheet, but it doesn’t go into the table.  And actually my table disappeared from the sheet.

It would be great if there were some tutorials out there for the following workflows:
1)  How to have FME write data into a specific table on a specific sheet, in a new excel file. It would be great if this can all be done solely by defining the sheet and table names in the writer parameters.  But if a template xlsx file is still needed, then that’s fine.

2)How to insert/update/delete rows in an existing table in an existing excel sheet

3) How to differentiate between named range and tables when writing.  I’m personally more interested in tables, and never really used named ranges.  

1 reply

pierrekoelich
Safer
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Hello everyone,

 

Andrew submitted a case where I did answer his question. I think the response was worthwhile, as it could help other users who might run into similar issues. The answers to the questions in the post are below:

1)Template files are not needed, you can write directly to a table using the ":" delimiter, for example Sheet1:Table1, if the table doesn't exist, then the writer will create a new one and you are able to apply any of the default excel table styles to it.

 

2) Similar to the above answer, if the table already exists you would point to it on the writer feature type and perform insert/update/delete operations on it. I show how to do this on the workspace I've attached.

 

3)Named ranges use the "/" delimiter and tables use ":"

 

Attached in the zipped folder template workspace and a sample file showing what the sheet looks like before writing.