PLC address list validation
A tool that checks PLC address lists in Excel workbooks: duplicates spread across sheets, and identifiers Excel silently turns into formulas.
Excel silently turned identifiers into formulas.
An industrial automation supplier maintained PLC input and output lists as multi-sheet Excel workbooks exported from an engineering tool. Manual cross-checking was unreliable for two reasons: card and device identifiers start with an equals sign, so Excel silently reads them as a formula and corrupts them, and duplicates spread across sheets were invisible.
A command-line tool that leaves the original sheets alone.
We wrote a command-line tool in Python that reads the workbook, skips metadata and header rows, copies every original sheet through unchanged with values forced to text so identifiers with an equals sign survive, and adds a merged sheet consolidating all of them. The stack is Python 3, pandas and openpyxl.