In this article, we are going to see how to create AgilePoint NX Apps with Excel as a data source.
Many businesses today run significant part of their business on Excel sheets. Even in large enterprises, lot of structured information is stored in Excel files.
The problem with using Excel is it doesn’t scale well. As Organizations add more people to collaborate on these Excel sheets, they have difficulty with version control. There are always questions like were their project managers using the most recent version of the template? Were prices up to date?
Organizations in past resorted to software like Excel online which come with online editing experience and version control but that locks them down to use of Office 365 as a document repository and also the Excel sheet would not present a dynamic UI to the user with rules, validations etc.
With AgilePoint NX, you could always convert the table in Excel to a Data Entity and create web application around the newly created Data Entity which helps you move away from Excel and modernizer your application portfolio easily but there might be business reasons due to which you might want to still continue keeping data in Excel.
With this new feature, you can create a nice looking web front-end to your tables in excel sheet with rules, external lookups, validations, calculations, charts etc. and no matter where you are in the world, the web apps connects your workbooks so that your people can work as a team, in real-time.
Key points for this feature:
- Connect to an Excel and read data fields into the process based and form-based application.
- Write back into the same Excel file, as the process execution/form submission happens.
- The Excel file can originate from any of our supported document repositories such as Box, One Drive, SharePoint etc.
Here is a short video showing this feature in action.