Best way for shared online sheet like web surface - excel

I haven't found a good and simple solution to my problem:
I need either online shared excel file with password protected access or a shared online form like excel adding names+rows+person related data.It has to be lockable on a specific date.
Google Sheets is too open and general. I have to be the admin and be able to lock the Sheet, if the deadline is past and the content in the forms should match.
Also, A simple doodle ak is not a desirable solution. Does Anyone know a product which provides such service? Or Do I have to write a quick web interface?

how about MS Sharepoint? we can use it for spreadsheet sharing, access control, online check in, edit and then check out, etc.

Related

How To Use VBA To Share Excel File With Fellow Office User?

How does one use vba to share an excel file with another office user? I have a template that needs to be customized slightly and shared as a separate workbook with hundreds of users (same active directory).
I have a table mapping out what files should be shared with what users as shown here:
I thought I could use a sharing method to set the permissions using MSOPermission. I've tried quite a few approaches which have all failed, but these were the ones I was most optimistic would work:
wkBk.Permission.Add "bill_User#company.com",msoPermissionEdit
wkBk.Permission.Add "SallyCEO#company.com",msoPermissionRead
wkBk.Permission.Add "billy_companyID",msoPermissionEdit
The specific error I receive (shown here) indicates something is wrong with the Permission Object. I can't find much documentation on this (a common pet-peeve of mine with Microsoft).
I've seen a couple posts shown below, but none address my question.
Automate File sharing
Share and unshare file
Permission sharing
I'm sure I'm in the wrong area or maybe I need to enable a library. I'm embarrassed to say that I even attempted to use the macro recorder, but no code was logged when I interacted with the sharing menu shown here.
Bonus Question
It's possible that VBA is not the best tool for handling my use-case situation. If there's a better automation method for my situation such as TypeScript or Power Apps, I will upvote any suggestions that include basic instructions or a reference with specific terms/procedures that I could use to hunt down an overall solution. Thanks.
Note to Microsoft: Executing this comparable task in Google Sheets is easy and well documented:
ss.addEditor("billyTheUser#gmail.com");
ss.addViewer("sallyCEO#gmail.com");
PowerApps was mentioned - assuming you have a standard O365 license and SharePoint Online available then it's possible to set access as needed here's an illustration from an SPO Documents library file:
Microsoft Documentation:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/customize-permissions-for-a-sharepoint-list-or-library-02d770f3-59eb-4910-a608-5f84cc297782
Option 4 from this article:
https://sharepointmaven.com/6-locations-can-set-security-files-sharepoint-office-365/

Excel Mobile Data Entry Form

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).

Sharepoint alternate ideas to get report from multiple user

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

Embedding an excel document into an application with excel online

I have been experimenting with excel online shared link to be able to embed an excel document to our internal web site. But this method is not viable because we can't actually make a public link because the data is private.
I was wondering if it was possible to embed an excel document any other way. I can add that we need an excel document with an add-in attached to it. I might have done something wrong but in my test, my add-in didn't show up in the embedded version of the document. I also noted that functionality seemed greatly reduced. Even with read-write permissions, I could input some data but couldn't delete anything which wasn't very useful in our case.
Ref:https://support.office.com/en-US/article/Share-it-Embed-an-Excel-workbook-on-your-web-page-or-blog-from-OneDrive-804e1845-5662-487e-9b38-f96307144081
Our goal is to be able to :
embed excel document into an application.
feed external data into the excel document when opened or on user input (done by an add-in)
user interaction (read-write-delete according to defined locks and column visibility)
save the relevant data to storage (done by an add-in)
save the document to OneDrive and/or to a specific location.
I am wondering if there is any solutions (now or in-progress) that would allow us to have most of the functionality of excel online while being managed by an application.
Possible solutions?:
We might have a partial solution where instead of creating a shared link, we could integrate our application to excel instead of doing thing the other way around. But it doesn't solve how to handle Microsoft accounts required to access the documents.
You'd have to do the heavy lifting in JavaScript I'm afraid and add-ins are out of the question. See a very rudimentary example of how to interact with an embedded Excel file here:
http://www.jkp-ads.com/Articles/embeddedexcel00.asp

To Create an Employee directory

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.

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