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Read Highlighted Cells

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Posted on by cdschoy

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When using the Read from Excel worksheet action, I'm able to retrieve all the values within certain column. Is it possible when retrieving the data from the Excel column to only record the cells in the excel sheet that are highlighted instead of everything inside the column?

Thanks!

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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The native Excel actions in PAD do not interact with cell formatting in any way. It cannot set highlighting, nor can it "see" it. In order to do something like this, you would need to use scripting, such as PowerShell or VBScript (which can be invoked from a PAD flow). You can either use a script to apply a filter to the file based on cell highlighting, and then use Read from Excel spreadsheet, to retrieve the data when it's filtered, or you can simply use a script to read the data.

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Nived_Nambiar 18,138 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi @cdschoy

try this vbs script to get values from highlighted cells in excel directly

Option Explicit ' Define the color you want to search for Const COLOR_TO_FIND = 6 ' Yellow color ' Define the worksheet name Const WORKSHEET_NAME = "Sheet1" ' Create an Excel object Dim objExcel Set objExcel = CreateObject("Excel.Application") ' Open the workbook Dim objWorkbook Set objWorkbook = objExcel.Workbooks.Open("D:\Temp\data.xlsx") ' Get the worksheet Dim objWorksheet Set objWorksheet = objWorkbook.Worksheets(WORKSHEET_NAME) ' Get the used range Dim objUsedRange Set objUsedRange = objWorksheet.UsedRange ' Loop through each cell in the used range Dim objCell For Each objCell In objUsedRange.Cells ' Check if the cell has the color we're looking for If objCell.Interior.ColorIndex = COLOR_TO_FIND Then ' Print the cell address WScript.Echo objCell.Value End If Next ' Close the workbook objWorkbook.Close False ' Quit Excel objExcel.Quit

The above script will print values of yellow colored cells in excel worksheet , for a sample sheet like below

Output will be:

This has to be done using Run VBS script action

Note: you have to replace the path mentioned in script (in script is mentioned as D:\Temp\data.xlsx) witn yours and color based on which cells needs to be find by replacing this line of code:

Const COLOR_TO_FIND = 6

the number corresponds to which cell color needs to be found out ,

refer this for color codes: https://www.automateexcel.com/vba/conditional-formatting/

I hope this helps !

Thanks & Regards,
Nived N 🚀

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