Cucumber Ruby and Excel

While 95% of my automation work is web service based, I did put together a bit of Excel validation.

I imported the Ruby gem "roo" which enables Excel, csv and OpenOffice support.  Once in, I could create a test like this to verify the headers of a excel file:
 Scenario Outline: Verify Column headers exist
    Given the financial document is loaded
    Then the <headers> should be at line <row> and column <column>

    Examples:
    |row|column|headers|
    |11 |A     |State  |
    |11 |B     |Government Function|
    |10 |C     |Full-time          |
    |11 |C     |employees          |
    |9  |D     |Full-time          |
    |10 |D     |Pay                |
    |11 |D     |(whole dollars)    |
    |10 |E     |Part-time          |
    |11 |E     |employees          |
    |9  |F     |Part-time          |
    |10 |F     |pay                |
    |11 |F     |(whole dollars)    |
    |10 |G     |Part-time          |
    |11 |G     |hours              |
    |9  |H     |Full-time          |
    |10 |H     |Equivalent         |
    |11 |H     |Employment         |
    |10 |I     |Total              |
    |11 |I     |employees          |
    |8  |J     |Total              |
    |9  |J     |March              |
    |10 |J     |Pay                |
    |11 |J     |(whole dollars)    |

And the step definition is like:
Given /^the financial document is loaded$/ do
  @loadFinancial = Excel.new("data/financial.xls")
end

Then /^the (.+) should be at line (.*) and column (.*)$/ do |headers, row, column|
  @loadFinancial.cell(row.to_i,"#{column}") == headers
end

Some things to note... since I'm passing a row # that's an integer and not a string, I need to do a .to_i to it.  This isn't the fastest solution. But if you have small data files that you want to manipulate or validate, this can work.  This test against 46 fields takes my laptop about 16seconds to complete.  That's pretty slow.  But it works.