The question here is: Am I on the right path (this is the first time I'm trying this), and if not, what would be smarter to try? If this is the right path, can you offer suggestions on how to do this best, because if this works, I am going to use it often on a lot of different tasks in this app.
I'm running a PowerApps Canvas app. As part of its program, I want it to be able to reference (read-only) a collection of data. That data is in ServiceNow, and my group is not permitted to access ServiceNow using the API.
During testing of the app, I just had it reference a SharePoint list (which I had filled with some dummy data), but I can re-code those lines as needed to pull from some other data source.
Because I am touching a few different systems here, I am not sure if this is the right way to go and I'm afraid I'll spend too long trying and find out that it would never have worked because of x. Thus my question.
This is what I think will work. Am I headed in the right direction?
Set up the scheduled report in ServiceNow. (Done!)
Program ServiceNow to email the Excel file output. Make sure it is
always the same title. (Done!)
Build a Power Automate flow to capture that email and save the
attached file to a location (OneDrive?) that can be accessed by the
app. If there is a file there already, delete it first.
Add the Excel file as a data source to the app, and start
referencing it as needed.
8-12 hours later, ServiceNow pushes out another scheduled data
drop, and the whole thing updates again.
In my perfect world, this system would work completely unattended.
Offhand, a glitch I can see is that ServiceNow generates an Excel file, but it's not a table, and PowerApps I think must ingest as a data source an Excel file that is a table. But (shrug) I might be wrong.
Am I thinking of this correctly? Is this the best avenue to follow?
Related
I have 500 Excel documents. I want users to keep working as if that was excel (I'll provide app for that) yet cross-reference data in-between that documents. What database can feet such needs?
So, if i get it ok then you need to get data from ~500 excel files while people may access and change them in real time! I can think of 4 ways of approach:
live links of all files to 1 workbook... hurts me to even think the maintenance and setting ... but it will be "live".
powerQuery: group them all in one data table using PowerQueries or PowerBI or similar, then load them on workbook OR save as csv... 1 button refresh, relatively quick, no actual coding needed
use VBA: access all files (or changed ones...) and get what you want, when you want it. If implemented expertly will only take a few seconds for full scan in modern pc, yet needs someone good at coding VBA.
setup 1) using VBA instead of manually, then using VBA to check for errors etc. Result will be "live" but requires again serious VBA coding...
I believe that 2) is the easiest choice with good maintenance features, ease of setting and good speed... (start in excel ...Data / new Query/from File/from Folder ...)
I'm trying to build some automation into Outlook, I receive a series of emails throughout the day; around 75. In each of these emails there is a particular string that I need to lookup on an Excel sheet and forward the email based on the retrieved results. I've researched several methods and they all seem clunky or problematic to me, I was hoping to get feedback on best practices to accomplish this.
So far, I've investigated :
Opening a background Excel doc hosted on a network drive, perform the vlookup and close the document. However, the network can sometimes bog down the opening of the file and having Outlook intermittently freeze is unacceptable.
Opening a background Excel doc hosted on a network drive and leave the file open in the background; to be used when needed. My issue is that I'm having a hard time keep the reference to the document as Outlook likes to "forget" it was there.
Converting the file to an Access Database (I have very limited experience here) hoping that Access has better tools for quickly querying files.
Again, I'm looking for advice on best practices.
Maybe you can copy the Excel file to your computer every day and then do the lookups on that.
So a bit of a general question. I work as a data analyst for a startup. My primary process involves taking existing customer data a client has and cleansing/normalizing it to fit into our platform once as part of our onboarding process. A member of our team exports their data from their system they are transitioning from or, if they kept track of it in house, we receive their Excel log they used to track it. It is always in a different format and requires extensive cleansing (avg 1 min/record). We take what is usually one large table (.xlxs format), and after cleansing, split it into four .csv files; which we load as four tables on our platform.
I feel I have optimized the process quite well in terms of the process steps and cleansing with excel functions (if, concat, text-to-columns, etc). I have beginner-intermediate skills in VBA and SQL and have just scratched the surface in R; what is frustrating is that I know there is the potential to automate this process but I just don't know where to start. If anyone has experience with something like this, code, a link to an article / another thread, or just some general direction would be much appreciated. Please ask for clarification where you feel it is needed. Thanks.
This will be really hard to do in Excel. If you have the time you can try out Optimus, a Data Cleansing library written in Python and Pyspark (you don't need to know spark). Here is the webpage https://hioptimus.com.
You can create Data Pipelines with it, and I recommend that you do that, try to generalize your processes, and asking the client for more a structure way of passing the data.
The good thing is that you don't need Big Data for running Optimus, bit if you have it some day, the same code will work.
Check out the documentation for more:
http://optimus-ironmussa.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Let me know if you have doubts!
In my company we have all products in an Excel-database. When a customer (shops) wants to place an order, they fax a form with item No etc. The order is entered through a VBA form, returning info about "in stock" etc, and the order is subtracted from the stock and placed in worksheet.
Now I would like to know, if its possible - without too much fuss, to do this from the www, so a customer can access the database and see if the item is in stock (which is not the hard part) - AND place the order so the database is updated in our local workbook.
I'm not asking for actual code, but ideas to a general approach.
Is it possible to run VBA forms from a remote computer?
Will XML, ASP etc be the answer?
Other ideas?
I'll appreciate any help.
This is all fairly easy to do if you have a proper database, there are all kinds of reasons not to use Excel.
Your best approach would likely be to build a web system around a database and move all application logic there.
But in your specific case it might be easier to build it around Sharepoint.
I am hoping someone might be able to help me.
My problem is essentially this: A Colleague enters information into an excel, which I then have to check and pass on by email. This is fairly time-critical.
What I would like to do is
have the colleague press a button that calls the macros on my computer (worksheet running continuously),or
have my colleague email me and I have a macro in Outlook which checks for specific subject lines, or
he saves it on the network, and I check every minute for new files in that folder.
While the last two of these are possible, the outlook solution is - for several company policy reasons - the very last resort, and I would also like to avoid the ongoing checking for files as I am already having slight performance issues (large worksheet with lots of external links that are being feed real time).
I am also open to all other suggestions someone might have. Thanks a lot!!
I'd go with the third option.
Make his workbook save information to a 'queue' file or folder. Your workbook can query this queue, which should be on the network somewhere, and notify you when its changed. Wouldn't even have to open it unless it has changed if you set it to compare modify dates, and could be small if it is saved as text or in XML format.
First option won't work because VBA framework is pretty locked down. Cross workbook macro activation isn't possible from what i understand.
Second option is more work than necessary, and VBA/Outlook will warn you every 5 minutes that its trying to access your mail folder since that's what malicious software typically does.
Like i said, the third option would be best, and his macro could be set to only write, could even encrypt the text using simple encryption methods so that others can't easily modify it if that is a concern.