Increase speed of nested loop Win32 Excel Manipulation

[Sasuke300]

Hey guys I have a problem with the speed of one part of my perl script. My script deals with a manipulation of a excel file. The part where the speed is very low is a nested loop and I have no idea how to avoid that. I can show you the part:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Win32::OLE;
use Win32::OLE qw(in with);
use Win32::OLE::Const "Microsoft Excel"

for ($begincol;$begincol<$totcol;$begincol++) {
    for ($beginrow;$beginrow<$maxrows;$beginrow++) {
        my $cap = $Sheet2->Cells($beginrow,5)->{'Text'};
        my $app = $sheet2->Cells(3,$begincol)->{'Text'};
        my $yes = "yes";
        if (index($app, $cap) != -1) {
            $Sheet->Cells($beginrow,$begincol)->{Value} = $asis;
        }
    }
$beginrow = 7;
}

[Perlbotics]

You could shift those parts from the current loop towards the outer loop that do not depend on the variables of the current loop (= are constant in that loop). This avoids unnecessary re-computation and might slightly improve performance.

use warnings;
use Win32::OLE;
use Win32::OLE qw(in with);
use Win32::OLE::Const "Microsoft Excel"

my $yes = "yes";  #-- moved: constant for both loops
 
for ($begincol;$begincol<$totcol;$begincol++) {
    my $app = $sheet2->Cells(3,$begincol)->{'Text'}; #-- moved: consta
+nt for next loop

    for ($beginrow;$beginrow<$maxrows;$beginrow++) {
        my $cap = $Sheet2->Cells($beginrow,5)->{'Text'};
        #-- moved out of inner loop:  my $app = $sheet2->Cells(3,$begi
+ncol)->{'Text'};
        #-- moved out of both loops:  my $yes = "yes";
        if (index($app, $cap) != -1) {
            $Sheet->Cells($beginrow,$begincol)->{Value} = $asis;
        }
    }
$beginrow = 7;
}

[poj]

As swl suggested, you can read/write data as a range.

#!perl
use strict; 
use Win32::OLE;
use Win32::OLE::Const "Microsoft Excel";
use Data::Dump 'pp';

$Win32::OLE::Warn = 3;

my $Excel =Win32::OLE->new('Excel.Application');
$Excel->{Visible} = 1;

my $Book = $Excel->Workbooks->Open('c:/temp/Book1.xlsx');
my $Sheet = $Book->Worksheets("Sheet1");

my $begincol = 2; my $beginrow = 6; # B6
my $endcol   = 4; my $endrow   = 10;# D10
my $c1 = $Sheet->Cells($beginrow,$begincol);
my $c2 = $Sheet->Cells($endrow,$endcol);
my $data = $Sheet->Range($c1,$c2)->Value;
pp $data;

$Sheet->Range("A16:C20")->{'Value'} = $data;
$Excel->Quit();
undef $Excel;

poj

[davies]

++. Even in VBA, this sort of IO is very slow & the docs recommend this approach.

Regards,

John Davies

[swl]

If you have not done so already, I would suggest you use Devel::NYTProf to identify where all the slow points are in your code. It will save a lot of guesswork, and there might be other parts of your codebase you had not thought of as causing bottlenecks.

In terms of the example code you gave, I have not used Win32::OLE, but I/O can often be a bottleneck in code. Is it possible to avoid repeated reading and writing of the file? i.e., read as much as you can in batch mode (a data range), update it in perl, and then write it back in one go? That said, you should run your code through Devel::NYTProf to make sure this is the case before you do any editing, and keep track of the timing changes to see if it makes a meaningful difference.