How to export data from repeating section to an Excel sheet in a readable format.

[#1]

I want to export data from list to an Excel file, but I have repeating section in the form, and it just export all the xml code into the Excel file, How can I export clean output to the Excel file?

[tomcastiglia · Accepted solution]

Sal,

By any chance are you using Nintex for Office 365?  If so, please check out the new Document Generation feature:

Using Document Generation to create Excel Report from List Items

If not, check out Vadim Tabakman​'s blog on how to extract data from a repeating section.  This includes a User Defined Action that you can download and use in your workflow that will extract the Repeating section XML into a text variable:

http://www.vadimtabakman.com/nintex-formsworkflow-parsing-repeating-section-data.aspx

You can then use some basic Nintex actions to convert the XML into a CSV text file, which can be easily opened with MS Excel.

Use the Query XML action to populate a collection variable for each repeating section field in the XML.  Then use a For Each action to loop through the collections with a Build String action to format each row as a comma separated values and append each row to the output variable.

Next you'll need to use Powershell to save the CSV string into a CSV file. Here is a reference for how to call Powershell from Nintex Workflow:

NTX PowerShell Action - Stable Release

The PowerShell syntax to save a string to a text file is simple:

{WorkflowVariable:CSVData} > \\ServerName\ShareName\Metadata.csv