Keyword Driven framework & Excel

I'm assuming the test case summary is more of general text and not necessarily documented steps, actions, etc?  So, if this was a unit of code, it would be pretty much just a commented summary at the top of the unit?

What if you wrote your reader for excel to detect, in the first column of any row, a particular character which would indicate to skip the row?  That way, in your sheet with your keywords, you could fill rows with the information from your test case summary and simply tell your reader to skip those rows?

In the driver that I'm using for my own framework, I wrap the code that parses the keywords in a single "if" clause to detect such a thing.  Basically, I tell it to look for a semi colon (;) symbol in the first field of each row.  If it finds it, it skips the rest of the loop and moves to the next record.

if (CaseDriverObject.Value(0) != ";"){

...

}
CaseDriverObject.Next();

Now, my reason for doing so is so I can activate and deactivate cases and such that I don't want to run simply by "commenting out" particular rows.  But you could achieve the same result and put your summary information into your keyword sheets.

The other thing that I do is that, for every row in my step file, I have a separate "Comments" column that is not used for anything within my code.  All that column does is contain any information that I feel is needed to clarify what the test step is doing in order to inform anyone coming after.  You could employ such a thing as well... just add a column to your keywords test sheet that contains "Comments" and make sure that your automation framework doesn't do anything with that column.

Just a couple of suggestions.