Alright, here's a difficult one for all the excel champions out there!
I'm making a time registration system for a small company. It contains one excel file with a list of all the different work tasks in the company. Now every employee has their own excel file, where they are to register the hours they spend on the individual tasks. The challenge is now to get the employee files to load the work tasks from the work task list document. Sounds easy!
The challenge is that all files are placed on a sharepoint drive. I've succesfully connected the registrations files with the work tasks file through my own sharepoint login, and everything works fine on my computer. Now when another employee opens their excel file for registration on their own computer, they are prompted to connect to sharepoint, however this somehow never succedes. The connection needs to be between two sharepoint files, which everybody can access, and not be dependent on any specific user logins.
Any ideas of how to make this connection in the right way?
What I'm doing right now is; Data -> Get Data -> From File -> From Sharepoint -> nameofcompany.sharepoint/site/nameofsite
And then from here I do the data transform needed.
I really don't want to make one huge excel file containing all the information, but dealing with sharepoint is driving me nuts...
Hope anybody can help!
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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.
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).
Until last month, I was creating Google WebApps with HTML interface, Java and Google Apps Script to let the users save data to Google Sheets.
That was working beautifully as all the users were able to save data to a single spreadsheet simultaneously without any data misses/issues.
This month onwards, I don't have the option to use Google Web Apps.
Therefore, I bought Visual Studio. Basically, I am trying to create an Interface using Visual Studio as I have some experience on Visual Basic codes, and then looking forward to save the data to MS Excel.
I have setup an FTP drive where I have saved a test .EXE file which saves their clipboard text to a single Rich Text File(I used the timer to save/read/refresh the file every few seconds). Since all the users have read/write/execute rights to that FTP folder, they are able to launch the .exe file simultaneouly from their systems and it's working perfectly. We are looking at a team of 100+ people.
Now the next step for me is to let them open the .EXE file where the data can be saved to a single Excel file. With Google Spreadsheets it was way too easy. But I need some guidance on how to do that with Microsoft. I studied through articles and articles to track the last updated row and push the data below that. I need tips from someone who has done something like this and if there's a better/efficient way of doing that.
Any help/article would be appreciated.
I plan on using Excel as the front-end and Access as the back-end only. (all queries and forms are in Excel). A single Access database will be queried from multiple Excel files that will be located on the share drive (Linux server). Access tables contain memo, text and number fields.
Data will be sent to Access tables and records will be appended/deleted; all via Excel.
There will be multiple users interacting with a single Access database via multiple Excel files located on the shared drive. Users will be interacting from different workstations with Windows 7, all have Access 2010 and Excel 2010 installed.
This process works for me from my workstation but I’m not sure what will happen when other 4 people will be sending/appending/deleting records to the same Database?
How do I make this work? What settings do I need to check in Access to make this possible?
Any advice will be greatly appreciated since I’m fairly new to Access.
Thank you!
Access is a file-server, and not a data-server.
That's means when you do a query on an Access database, all the data are going to the client part, who process the query.
Let a query "get the books written by Kernighan" in your Excel. Excel will ask to Access (throught the ADO or DAO) : "send me all the books". Access will send ALL the books, and Excel will find the book written by Kernighan.
In the same way, if Excel (still with ADO / DAO) want to make an update, it does it localy. The Access database will just set up a flag to prevent conflicts. (btw, this flag is stored in the .laccdb file)
In your case, all that are done by the ADO/DAO layer, which will
send all the data
set a flag to prevent the conflicts if one data is in Edit mode
So, to be short : yes, you can do it ;)
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).