CAT 1.15.0
Testing MS Excel Files
You can automate tests against MS Excel data and their structure, since the very beginning of CAT. What is new in this version then?
Our users reported issues when loading MS Excel data for testing, such as problems with empty sheets and data types guessing. Starting with this version, CAT has its own engine for loading MS Excel data to memory for testing. What does it mean for you?
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You can work with open MS Excel files. No need to close them before running test or SQL queries against them.
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You don’t have to specify names of sheets if you want to work with all the sheets in the workbook.
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Load will never fail. If you have a sheet with numeric column Age and there is a text value on the row number 1,000,000, the load will not fail. Instead, the resulting table column is automatically changed to VARCHAR. That will allow you to automate tests of the data structure and tests that reveal the problematic value - much better than failing the load and investigating why…
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There are new options to normalize column names and table names - querying will be then much easier if you deal with columns named like “Paid in current period? (yes or no)”.
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Names of the sheets are now case-insensitive.
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There is no unreliable guessing whether the data have headers or not. The tester decides if yes or no.
The documentation has been updated accordingly. See full documentation.
And what is the best - we got rid of dependencies when it comes to loading MS Excel data. If you report any unwanted behavior, we can respond much faster.
We are still working on a brand new version of CAT Studio. You’ll soon be able to author automated tests for your data from a new app, without touching YAML or command line. Stay tuned.
That’s it :-). Happy testing!
CAT team