<p>I have a repeatable business process that I execute every week as part of my configuration management responsibilities. The process does not change: I download change details into Excel, open the spreadsheet and copy out details based on a macro, create a Word document from an agenda template, update the agenda with the Excel data, create PDFs from the Word document, and email them out.</p>

<p>This process is very easily represented in a sequence workflow and that's how I have it so far, with COM automation to handle the Excel and Word pieces automatically. The wrench in the gears is that there is a human step between "create agenda" and "send it out," wherein I review the change details and formulate questions about them, which are added to the agenda. I currently have a Suspend activity to suspend the workflow while I manually do this piece of the process.</p>

<p>My question is, should I rewrite my workflow to make it a state machine to follow a best practice for human interaction in a business process, or is the Suspend activity a reasonable solution?</p>

[{'answer_id': 72669, 'author': 'Erratic', 'author_id': 2246765, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/2246765', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Depending on the nature of your data and the parties that upload the excel files, you might want to consider having them save the data in .csv format.  It will be much easier to parse on your end.</p>\n\n<p>Assuming that isn\'t an option a quick google search turned up <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpexcelreader/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpexcelreader/</a> which might suit your needs.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 75493, 'author': 'gobansaor', 'author_id': 8967, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/8967', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>The open-source ETL tool Talend (<a href="http://wwww.talend.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://wwww.talend.com</a>) will generate Java or Perl code and package such code with the necessary 3rd party libraries. </p>\n\n<p>Talend should be able to handle all versions of Excel and output the result set in any format you require (including loading it directly into  a database if need be).</p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/72667', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/7565/']