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
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 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.
Our Web Application stores/creates documents for clients. Our clients download these document which contain custom tagging parts which are client specific and stored the customxml part in both Excel and Word documents. We currently use an activex ribbon bar app that retrieves these parts and displays them for the user. This allows them to access these parts to be inserted into the document by the ribbon bar app.
We then sought a better and more compatible way to accomplish this to get away from activex but also allowing clients that use older version of Word and Excel to continue to use the activex control.
Microsoft assisted us in creating our Word Addin that used Angular and Office js to accomplish this in MS Word.
Now we need to replace our Excel ribbon bar app. I am leading the creation of this tool and found that Excel API currently does not allow access CustomXml Part in the document structure.
Is there any way to access the customxml part in Excel?
Is there any plans to allow access in a future release.
Can you recommend a best practice for storing and retrieving these part if the first two question are no.
We are using Angular2 and Office.js to create the new addin.
I believe this is coming soon in API set 1.5 : see the open spec details here
https://github.com/OfficeDev/office-js-docs/tree/ExcelJs_OpenSpec/reference/excel
As Charles mentioned, Custom XML parts API will be available as part of Excel API #1.5 set.
If you have 1702 build of Excel, you can test this out now. See here for details.
I have the following customer scenario:
User clicks on button in Excel and data from certain Excel-Sheet is transferred to Dynamics CRM.
Someone ever did something like this? Possible with VBA or JavaScript?
Thx!
Out of the box CRM provides the ability to import Excel spreadsheets to create or update existing records.
Or you can always build something custom, manipulating CRM data via the web services.
I have done somewhat similar thing with excel, except i wrote vsto addin that used bit modern approach. You can easily use crm sdk ddl when writing add-ins for excel.
But with VBA i think you might hit quite wall there, you would have to write almost all methods over.
My prefer for here would be write vba script that send excel sheet data to webserver (node.js, .net) and there you can make actual data transfer to crm api. One good example would be writing csv file from data and save it to server, trigger server to manipulate that data.
This SO question shows a programmatic way for highlighting text in a word document. I am looking to do the same thing but for a document opened inside Sharepoint 2010.
From this link I understand that a document can be opened inside sharepoint itself using the office webapp (a bit of a hack in 2010, better in 2013) or in the local user instance of word/excel/...
I would need programmatic, read-only control over that preview. Mainly to highlight particular text fragments. I would think it should be possible to do this for the webapp instance but not for the locally started instance. Though I have't found any example code or pointers how to approach this. Commercial solutions are not an option.
Edit:
Related question
There seems to be some kind of an api
for the Excel web app but not for word
As far as I can see this is not possible, but happy to be proven wrong. The only solution I see is to do the highlighting on the server side up front (e.g., using com or openxml libs) in a separate copy of the document or on the fly (e.g., like here). Then serve the processed document to the client.