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).
Related
Right now I export a large amount of data from a legacy system into CSV, then use excel macros to automatically filter and split up daily "inventory" for 20+ users to work. I've attempted uploading the CSV into access but it's too slow and ends up much larger than I want it to be.
I have all of the same data into a SQL server already. Normally I would set up my own web service and toss together a quick site. However I'm limited to Azure and office online products. I was wondering what Microsoft online product would be better to make dashboards for the users and distribute the work. I guess just need to know if I should focus on learning SharePoint online or Dynamics online or if MS has another product that would be a better fit.
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).
We've a real pain in our project where we ask a team of 50 resources to update a single excel sheet that's placed in a network location and when someone tries to update the data, it's locked by somebody else and they don't update it. So, they end up not updating the data.
I'm looking for an alternate solution like
creating a form in sharepoint/ jira - no sharepoint/ jira developer
getting data in mail - too tedious and lots of rework
creating a custom form and hosting it in local server - might work - any templates on this?
Or, any alternates? I'm out of ideas.
easiest thing would be to create a simple SharePoint-List. All Users can update their data at the same time and the Input-Form will be there automatically. (Can also be exported to Excel)
If you are on SharePoint-Online you could also have a look at Windows Form which provide more flexibility in creating the form.
And if you need even more capabilities you can have a look at PowerApps
In Microstrategy 9.4.1 i created a dashboard from the web and then i tryed to edit it from the desktop and i got the following message
this analysis will be converted to a document and the change cannot be undone. are you sure?
I could read on the MSTR site that the difference between Dashboards and Documents is the following:
Document is a editing and formatting of report in a prescribed manner. where as Dashboard is a output result of Document. Dashboard is a Graphical view of Report in Flash mode and it is more interactive.
I want to say also that Documents and Dashboard are two different kind of object, they also have two different icons.
Why while editing a Document from the desktop suite i have more option than from the web?
Can I Edit a Dashboard from the desktop suite? If not, why?
Quite long, go to the end for the quick answers.
Probably there is a bit of confusion on the MicroStrategy documentation because of the history of the terms Documents and Dashboard and how they were used.
In the past, MicroStrategy had only Reports (also called Datasets when used to provide data for a Document or a Dashboard) and Documents.
A MicroStrategy Documents allowed to do more fancy stuff, use data from multiple Reports (or Datasets), more formatting options (headers and footers), show more graphs or grids on the same screen, use Autotext fields (like to automatically show the current date, the prompt answers used, the name of the user running the document), and other thing that I forget now, but I think you got the idea.
Documents could be used to generate those huge PDF reports that nobody was going to read. Then the Business Intelligence world went frenzy for the dashboard thing.
MicroStrategy Documents were perfect for that, you just needed to have the whole document in a single screen and you had a perfect dashboard done with MicroStrategy.
Of course we are talking now about the time when people started to look at their data without printing them, maybe publishing them on the company intranet or some primitive websites.
MicroStrategy embraced this internet revolution offering the possibility to create flash based Documents and the possibility to edit them directly in your browser. I do suspect that at this point MicroStrategy Desktop and the Web editor were quite aligned in terms of functionality (even if sometimes it was hard to find that specific thing: i.e. if you have to format a graph in web you can do it only in the editable mode?)
Release after release the two environments become two different beasts and now some options are available only in one of them (i.e. sorting selector values). Sometimes it seems to me they lost part of the source code of MicroStrategy Desktop so they can do new things only in web. I'm joking :)
Back to dashboards, some of them were nice, most of them were so so (and people started to write about how to show your data in a better way). The main problem is that they are very nice to show data to big bosses, but they have really little value for operation people.
To tackle this problem new tools started to show up, tools to do easily data discovery, data visualization, data analysis, you name it. There were a number of new companies (QliK, Tableau) with new solutions. Initially they were doing just a slice of what a big BI tool was doing but people could use them knowing little or nothing of SQL, Data Warehousing and ETL and they were also looking cool too.
After a while MicroStrategy realized that they needed a cool tool to do the same things if they didn't want to fall behind, so with version 9.2 MicroStrategy announced his own tool for data analysis: MicroStrategy Visual Insight.
MicroStrategy Visual Insight was included with the standard user licenses, had a flash based engine and it was working only on web (and mobile).
Finally in version 9.4 MicroStrategy renamed Visual Insight MicroStrategy Dashboard.
TL;DR:
It's true often you can do a thing in desktop, but you can't do it in MicroStrategy web, or vice versa. Unfortunately nobody knows why.
MicroStrategy Dashboards can be edited only in web because they are flash based.
I've inherited a large Excel spreadsheet that does some financial calculation magic using any number of simulation tables, and have been asked to write a web application as a front end. Now I could spend endless hours trying to figure out the sheet, or I could call the excel sheet from my web app. I seem to need the Office Primary Interop Assemblies, but do I also need to install office/excel on the web server? How can I handle multiple simultaneous requests to the same sheet? Is this approach even possible?
We have implement a project where we call several Excel spreadsheets from a web app.
We use Sharepoint Excel Services to do this. It has worked very well for us.
In our case our largest spreadsheet has over 300 input parameters, 1000 formuals and 50 results. This takes about 0.5 seconds, where most of that time is moving data in and out of excel services via a web service.
The main draw back in using Sharepoint Excel Services is the cost. However, in our case the saving in development time far out weighed the cost.
Excel is a desktop Application (and a very good one) and not designed for either multiple users or deployment in a web application. You might be able to cobble something together but you are likely to have to write a lot of code to manage the design features of a desktop app which are inadequacies in a web app.
You are better off trying to understand what the Excel workbook is doing and simulating it in code with the desired multi-user features in mind which must have been beneath the request for a web app. If you have access to the current users and/or author you should be able to document the requirement and you have the Excel workbook for you to test your algorithm against once you have understood it.
Best of luck.
Take a look at SpreadsheetGear. Ordinarily it is used to generate new spreadsheets, but it has a calculation engine for existing spreadsheets too. And unlike Excel, it was designed for a server environment.
Spreadsheet Gear
You can try SmartXLS for .net,it has a calculation engine for Excel workbook,it does not depend on Excel.
Not sure if this is appropriate to your task, but could you not import it into Google Spreadsheets to make it multi-user? If it is really complicated then I shouldn't think this will work, but might be worth a try.