Good day beautiful people,
Overall description
I have been assigned to a project where recruiters are using excel file to gather information about new joiners, leavers and people changing positions. Later on it is uploaded to SharePoint where this data is connected to some other files, dashboards and so on. There is also a copy of it, in InfoPath, but the program is working terribly wrong so personally for me this is no-go zone.
My goal
I would like to make this more automated and user friendly, so that's why I wanted to move it to the SharePoint. I want users to have one page, subpage, app to fill up necessary data, edit it if needed and then publish to the SharePoint.
Problem
I have visited tens of pages how to create SharePoint form without InfoPath, how to create SP form with PowerApps but most of these articles provides nothing useful. Just brief overview and I am not that power user of SP to get this done in no time.
Question
Is there a way, that I can make this working within accepted mater of time (few days) so the end result will be exactly what I need?
Make some lists in SharePoint with the columns they need, use that as your data source. Link your PowerApps application to that source, et voila. Recruitment can now fill their data in with what you need, and via Power Automate you can process the data and send it to the correct locations afterwards.
Related
I am trying to create a data entry "app" to collect daily readings across our site. Here are the three biggest constraints:
Software - ideally, we would use some software within the Microsoft 365 Suite, mainly because those are the only approved apps on site. It may be possible to use open source software, but that might raise some flags in terms of security. So my thoughts are to use either Excel or Access.
Cost - ideally, we do not want purchase any additional software licenses. I would try and create something with Power Apps, but we do not have the licensing for an Azure or SQL server to store the data. I could be missing something here though.
Mobile-Friendly - finally, it needs to work on an Android tablet. Currently, we collect readings using pen and paper. The whole idea of this is to move towards using a tablet.
The easiest approach would be to create an Excel spreadsheet, save it on OneDrive, and edit the spreadsheet. I don't love this option because we are collecting 100's of data points each day. This would end up with a very wide spreadsheet that will be cumbersome to navigate.
The other option I looked into was creating an Access database and accompanying form and storing it on SharePoint. However, it seems Microsoft has stopped supporting Access databases on SharePoint.
I have created data entry forms using VBA, similar to this, but these do not work on mobile.
Is it possible to create a data entry form in Excel that also works on the Android version of Excel? Are there other alternatives I am not thinking of?
I am engaged in just this kind of project also. I have written an app in PowerApps, built an Excel spreadsheet and stored it in OneDrive, and am running it (the app) on an iPad. The design differs somewhat from your description of directly presenting a spreadsheet to the user (which I think PowerApps could do) because I don't want users having direct access to the data.
Edit: You do not need Azure or SQL, unless you are storing tons of data. Excel can be a satisfactory data storage location for modest uses.
I found the learning curve for PowerApps to be quite steep, as it's a different paradigm than line-by-line coding.
I think this is a more user friendly way to collect data than trying to run an Excel form, and once you get it made and polished, you'll look like a pro :)
I am by no means an expert but if you need some tips I'll do what I can to help. It sounds like we are at similar developmental stages.
Is it possible to create a data entry form in Excel that also works on the Android version of Excel? Are there other alternatives I am not thinking of?
Microsoft Forms does the job when created from OneDrive on mobile browser. Side note: the form I just created and the response I submitted have now disappeared from my OneDrive.
I also saw some people using Power Automate to save responses from a form into an Excel file (every reponse).
I am completely new Office 365 (and SharePoint) but have been asked to create a site that will display a range of data in the form of graphs and tables etc The data will change daily and therefore it must be possible for members of the team to enter new raw data, for the results to then be displayed through Office 365.
I realise this might sound a little vague but my initial thoughts are that SharePoint is what I should use to display the data and to have a SQL backend database that stores the data for SharePoint to connect to. Having done some reading on the topic and I am still a little unsure if this is common practice or even possible.
Any inital pointers would be greatly appreciated.
This can be done with Power BI. The data sources can by almost anything, SQL, spreadsheets, online sources, you name it. Create queries to get the data, model it (if required) and build reports and dashboards that display in a browser (or on a phone).
I'm hoping this is possible.
The organization I work for has a Sharepoint site and I am able to Upload Files to pages, however I am not an admin on our Sharepoint. I'm not sure what the version is, I think its older (ie: 2005).
I have some Excel Reports I've built. The data for these reports is pulled from a SQL Server Database which I have full control over. I have setup a Job in SQL Server to run every 12 minutes, this procedure pulls in some data and updates a few tables. These tables are used to feed my Excel Reports.
I have a separate Scheduled task set to open my excel report(s) refresh the data connections and save as a PDF.
I would like to link to these PDF Files via our Sharepoint so that the VIPs can access the reports as they want, but they always see the most up to date report.
I was trying to link to a Shortcut to the PDF Files but SharePoint doesn't seem to like that. How do I make the SharePoint link point to the PDF File that is saved over every 15 minutes?
Thanks in advance,
Any insight is greatly appreciated.
The way I do it (newish version of Sharepoint) is make the save location for the PDF the network location where Sharepoint keeps the files for that site. Usually you'll have access to those if you can edit the Sharepoint site.
Here is a tutorial to find that network location.
EDIT: It very well may be disabled by the admin at the moment. But it looks like the functionality is there.
Given the age of your SharePoint (either 03 or 07), most of the modern tools that you could use to do this don't exist for you (Excel reporting, BI tools, etc). The easiest solution I can think of is to actually modify the other side of the equation. A few options:
Change your report to output two copies of the same file. One entitled (as an example) currentreport.xls and the other report20150626.xls . Put the link to the currentreport.xls in SharePoint.
Build an ASP.net page that runs the SQL query you have built and pull the data through a view. Since this would be pulled on demand, it may be a few more cycles of your SQL code, but indexing, caching and selective data pull can prevent this from being an issue. Put the asp.net code in an iFrame in a SharePoint content editor web part.
Build your report using SSRS and host the output of that in SharePoint using an iFrame.
Run a scheduled job in SQL that copies your current report data to a table and query that table instead of your normal report table. That way you only have one Excel file that points to a specific table so no need to update links. You can always keep copying data to specific files if you need a historical record and can't use the DB to store this data for you (though the amount of space that it would take to do so would be minimal).
I am having problems figuring out a calendar workflow and am beginning to think what I need cannot be done w/out using .NET. I want to copy calendar items up and down between sites.
The site collection structure is Office-->Division-->Branch. There are 5 divisions under the office and multiple branches under each division. Each is a separate site with its own own calendar.
I want to populate a calendar on one site and have the item pushed up or down the site chain to another site calendar. So I need to be able to promote calendar events up AND down between calendars on different sites within the same site collection. Also, I don’t need the whole item copied. I need all fields except one because each site has its own set of check box values for one of the fields.
All my research has indicated this can’t be done without programming and I do not have Visual Studio. I have heard BCS may be a solution but am not sure that we have it. We are using SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Server but many things are not available to me such as Data Sources. One recommendation I got was to have one site (office) and put everything below it as site pages. So divisions and branches would just be pages, not separate sites. However, this seems like it would get out of hand quickly. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
So it looks like my site structure is not optimal as SharePoint lists and libraries do not easily flow between sites. I will need to change the structure so all the divisions and branches are site pages, not sites. This way everything will live in the same site and it will be much easier to move data around via workflow.
In this case, I won't need to move any data between calendars because now I can use one calendar for the office, divisions and branches and create different views to show the required data.
We are researching the various options that exist in our environment to create an Employee Directory. We have a SharePoint portal, AD and recently moved from Lotus Notes to Exchange. Our current employee search is a custom Notes DB that has since been retired.
Since moving to SharePoint an year ago, we've used a custom list using SharePoint Profiles that are updated from AD. But the simple list interface isn't very user friendly and is very slow. Sone of the requirements include type-ahead, pictures, and details of skills/certifications and other demographic information etc. We are considering building an ASP.NET or SilverLight application that can consume the information in the SharePoint list. With the introduction of Outlook and the Global Address List, we are now wondering if it might be easier to build something within Outlook.
Has anybody traveled a similar path and what would you advice us to do?
Microsoft has a huge set of offerings for Collaboration and Social Computing in Sharepoint.
See this document, pages 8 and 9 for information about features related to an employee directory, including details of skills/certifications and other demographic information.
A la carte availability of individual features (such as People Profiles and People Search) and pricing may be an issue, but you may want to look into buying something rather than building it (if you can get the pieces you want for a price you can afford).
Sharepoint can connect with Outlook to keep the lists synchronized if you want to use outlook. And there are definitely a lot of different ways to change the way the lists are presented in the Sharepoint portal to make them more user-friendly. Having those details on the portal will certainly be a boon when combined with the powerful search and indexing features in SharePoint so you can identify employees based on their profile details easily.
We use the people search for this pretty effectively. We populate data in AD, then connect profile properties to AD attributes. That's only if you have MOSS, though. If you're working with WSS, you'll have to build something more custom.
One gotcha, though, is that the People Search out of the box doesn't easily do partial searches (i.e. searching for "john" doesn't match "johnson"). That's a big downer in my mind. You can use Ramon Scott's approach of a Content Editor Webpart with a form and some Javascript to work around it, and you can also get there via the advanced search box (albeit indirectly), but it sure would be nice if it were easy to make the default search box do partial name searches.
I recently just discoverd a somewhat easy visual basic script that draws information from the active directory where you can specify which OU to draw from where it displays all user information in a simple .HTM page. it includes a search bar, recognizes patterns (address) (company telephone number) etc... If you would like i can post it for you. you only need to fill in a few sections (display name for directory, OU, OU display, and tags) and you can always change the way things look too.
This should be taken care of by using the My Site feature that's available within SharePoint. You will then be able to search SharePoint users by skills, certifications, projects, and educational qualification.
Please refer to the SharePoint Planning and Deployment material on TechNet for more info.
SH.