I would like to create an Excel Tool that would act as a Monitoring Tool for our agents on the floor.
Right now we don't have an exclusive WFM tool that would monitor and call out agents with their activities and productivity, the only thing we have is a dashboard to view all agents status and the durations of their status or calls. This is a web-based viewer of our dialer that would only shows agents with their current status but they won't trigger or notify if an agent is going over our set thresholds for their wrap up time, over breaks or lunch.
Currently, I have an existing excel file that would look up values from another sheet to populate the table with information that I need such as the name of agent, their current status and current duration of the call.
The another sheet I've mentioned above is a blank sheet where I would simply paste all the data from the webpage of our dialer. So basically I am just doing copy-paste method where I am selecting all the contents from this webpage which is our dialer and pasting it in on the blank excel sheet that I created and the table that I made will find all the values that I setup from that blank sheet.
I really don't have enough knowledge but I still tried Data>Get Data>From Web and I am not getting anything.
I tried pasting the web link, but I don't seem to pull up any data.
I know as I've mentioned, I don't really have enough knowledge and maybe I need some basics doing this method.
What I would like to happen is if there's a way to link a webpage, sync its data to an excel sheet and is it possible to make it real-time so that way I can have an improvised WFM Tool that would help me monitor our agents activities?
Thank you in advanced!
Getting data from the Internet through a standard mechanism (Data >Get Data > From Web) is not always successful. Excel can recognize tables on a web page, but not always in the way that the human eye recognizes them.
Actually, there are two options here:
write a macro that parses specifically those pages from which you are currently getting data manually (“…I am just doing copy-paste method…”).
prepare web pages so that data from them can be automatically downloaded via Data >Get Data>From Web via standard Excel functionality.
Both require programming specifically for your task.
For example, I could write a parser, but for this I need access to the web page from which you are copying and pasting.
Or the programmer who wrote the web page can create new pages with the same data, but in a format that Excel understands. But this programmer needs to specify exactly how to design web pages.
Related
Currently, I'm connecting Jotform to Google sheets where information with the submissions are uploaded. We primarily use excel for the bulk of our operations and would like to connect the submissions uploaded from google sheets to excel. I can use import data from web which excel offers but it more so just copies the entire table even if you delete some rows on excel.
I want to do something similar to what zapier offers where the connection is not just a copy of the entire table and it only uploads new rows uploaded to google sheets onto excel and refreshes frequently.
Is there a way I can do this? My best bet is to use Google sheets API's? But i'm not sure where to get started.
What are "new" submissions? Excel need to know that.
You can directly import the data from jotform to Excel, no need to do it via google sheets.
Yes, even then all submissions are downloaded, that will always be the case. But not all need to be displayed. You can choose in and with Power Query what shall remain and loaded to Excel.
If you don't use a date for what you consider new, you have to store all old data in Excel as well, so Excel can see whether a submission is already downloaded before or not. You could load all data to the Data Model, where it uses very little space.
You need to learn PowerQuery for this. It is very worth it, because with little learning you can do a lot of fantastic things to your submissions and other data.
I work for a fairly large hospital in their Decision Support Department. We have several tools at our disposal for querying data, but our way of distributing the information could use some work.
We typically run our query and then copy and paste the data into Excel. From there we create graphs and crunch some numbers before sending the Excel file out via email.
We've recently been given access to our own Sharepoint site and so far it looks promising for document distribution. What I'm wondering though is this; what kind of functionality is built into Sharepoint for building reports that run automatically.
It would be great to take a whack of our monthly query to Excel reports and set them up to run automatically via Sharepoint.
I did some reading about Sharepoint lists and that seems promising, but I thought I'd ask here for the best way to go about this - provided it's even possible.
I guess a good first step would be how to create a report in Sharepoint?
I'm going to assume you're using Sharepoint 2013 and Office 2013.
You have a couple options available to you with Excel and Access. Both methods I'll briefly describe can be automated. In either case, you will need Lists, as they can connect to Excel and Access as tables.
For the Excel route, simply choose the "Export to Excel" option in a SharePoint list. This will create an Excel version of your list, but it's more than a static workbook--that workbook retains a one-way link from SharePoint to Excel, so you can refresh the spreadsheet to reflect the most up-to-date version of your SharePoint list. Furthermore, you can link multiple Lists to a single workbook--you'll have to export each list to Excel individually, but each worksheet will still retain its link to its respective list after you consolidate the spreadsheets into a single workbook. You can save this workbook wherever you like, it'll still keep the link. I personally like to set my linked workbooks up with macros that automatically refresh the spreadsheet whenever file is opened, but that's just me. The reason you might consider this option would be to avoid having to recreate the work of creating graphs and whatever other analytics you're doing--you may well be able to set yourself up such that the graphs and analytics pull live from the table that's coming in from SharePoint.
*Do note that changes you make to list data in Excel isn't sent back to SharePoint--this is done to protect your list.
For the the Access route, you can import a list into Access as a table. This option creates a dynamic link to your SharePoint list the same way the Excel option does--the link is one-way and what you do in Access won't be sent back to SharePoint. You can create queries and reports as you normally would after the table is imported.
I have this application called IRESS that has data that I then manually copy and paste to a spreadsheet to do certain calculations. I was wondering if there is any possible way of automating this process.
There is a web services interface to IRESS which you can find more about here. So if you send a correctly formatted message to IRESS, it will respond with a message containing the data you requested and you can then update your spreadsheet with that data
If our finance department wants us to create a web app that pulls data from a spreadsheet calculation, based on user input, but also want that spreadsheet to be private from all developers working on the app, is this possible?
How do companies launch an app with sensitive information that they want to protect?
Can you access data from an excel spreadsheet that is security protected?
Easiest way to develop such an application (this is a high level answer of "how do develop an app when you can't see the classified or protected data" not "how do i make a web portal with an excel backend") is to get "dummy" data.
You make the dummy data just as protected, but give the developers the ability to see the data on the other side of the wall. You make sure the datatypes are the same (the only thing different should be values) and go from there. That's the easy way. After the app is developed with the dummy data, it's deployed and people with access to the data "connect the pipes" and away you go.
As to using an excel sheet as a backend to a website..please look into MySQL or MSSQL or some other database solution. The developer coming after you will thank you.
If you can't because of management..ripping open an excel file directly is not for the faint of heart, but microsoft does provide an api to access the insides. I've done it once..and don't remember how to off the top of my head, but perhaps someone more skilled remembers the api. The easier road is to have that workbook output to CSV (which is easily parsed).
I would recommend the excel workbook update a table that you apply whatever security scheme you need to on. Also you can put the workbook in a location that only those with proper rights can access.
If the user input is limited to a a field or two and the values are for easily determined values that doesn't span a huge range, then create a lookup table. In this table, you would store the results for all possible combinations of input values. This would allow for you to not putting the Excel spreadsheet on the Web server.
I know it is easy to display a counter on a webpage but I need to implement the same, ie, I need to write data to a cell in the Excel 2007 spreadsheet every time a person downloads it from my webpage.
To be more precise, when the user downloads the excel file to his hard drive and when it is opened, I want the spreadsheet to display the number of times the .xls file has been downloaded, in a cell (ofcourse along with other cells containing data).
I just need to figure out how do i programmmatically communicate with Excel 07 sheet.
That sounds like an exercise in futility since the number will be out of date as soon as the next person downloads the file. Is this what you really want to do?
If yes, it's very possible using some server-side scripts. PHP, Perl and other languages all have libraries that can be used to edit Excel files programmatically. Pick the one you are most comfortable with and go from there.
EDIT:
I think the best way to go since you control both the Excel file and the website is to add a counter to the website, and reference it in your Excel file via web queries. If you're not familiar with web queries, they are a tool in excel that let you import tables from the web that will be refreshed everytime the file loads (or even if a user hits refresh). Here's more information about the Web Query Tool.
Let me know if this solution works for you.
EDIT2:
Here's a link to a more up-to-date tutorial.