Is it possible to find the file that is creating an excel file?

Question

I have an excel file that was created by Alteryx, but I'm not sure which Alteryx file generated the excel. I was wondering if there was a way to backtrack and see what program created an excel file.

Thanks

Answer 1

You won't be able to tell which Alteryx workflow created the file, but you can tell that it was created by Alteryx. In the document properties you can find the company that "created" the file which will show up as Alteryx,Inc.

Answer 2

So I've created a very simple workflow that reads in a few lines of a csv and exports to an excel file, "TestOutput.xlsx".

If you then open the .yxmd Alteryx file in a text editor, you can see that it's just stored as .xml ... here's the relevant section for the output:

From here all you need is a way of searching through text files. Using findstr, I can quickly identify the file that produced my excel file: