Excel Online Connector

Authentication Methods

You will be asked to authenticate your Microsoft account and allow permissions. This is using OAuth, your organization’s IT team might need to authorize the app for you to be able to connect to your account.

You will see this popup on the bottom right of your screen once the authentication has been successful.

You will then be able to select a workbook that is available on your Microsoft 365 account.

Typical use-cases

Most people use Excel Online to manage their day to day business needs. The Excel Online connector allows you to create, update and delete items based upon a table in Excel Online. You can have multiple connectors if you wanted to bring multiple tables of data into your story.

When using the Excel Online connector, you will be able to select a workbook, which then subsequently gets added to the story, so you can always go to the Data Grid > Resources to see previous Excel Files used.

How to Use the Connector

Once you have created an Excel Online connector, you will be presented with the “Connect” screen (which is standard for all connectors). This is where you will be able to select a workbook as shown:

You can choose the workbook that you would like to utilize in the story via. the drop-down menu as shown:

Note: You can only choose the workbooks that have been directly shared with you. If the workbook has been shared with you but you cannot see it on the drop-down menu, please go into the workbook and share it with yourself.

Once the workbook has been selected, you can now press “Next” to move to the mapping section of the connector, where you will select the table of data, which category you want to import the data into and map the fields in the Excel workbook to the attributes in the SharpCloud story.

Tip: Each sheet is taken as a Sheet in this connector, it cannot recognize tables at the moment so each sheet in the workbook will be treated as the table in the connector drop down menu when choosing the table.

You can view the Source Data, which is the data from the Excel Table and how SharpCloud reads this by clicking on the “View Source Data” button.

You can see we are bringing in the “Plant and cost data” sheet and importing them into Category 1.

You need to nominate an External ID (a unique identifier for each item) in the “External ID” column.

A unique number is created for each row in the spreadsheet which can be used for the External ID. If you are adding or deleting rows in Excel, it is a lot better to bring in your own unique field and nominate that field as the External ID to avoid incorrect data mapping/loss.

For the other fields, you can either map the column to existing attributes in your story or by selecting “(NEW)” which will create a new attribute/property in your story and you can select it’s type.

Note: For Tag Groups and Categories, these will need to pre-exist before mapping onto those fields – you can access the Story Setup to perform those actions from the top of the screen.

You can provide a filter on the incoming items, for example, to only create items with a “Plant” value of “Plant 1” by using the drop-down on the far right as shown below:

For more advanced actions and queries, you can access the underlying SQL queries to discover and edit how you wish the data be imported and perform special functions such as JOIN. To access the SQL, simple use the toggle in the top left that says “Show Advanced SQL”:

Note: Once you edit the SQL, you will not be able to return to the drop-down version of the mapping as there are SQL functions that can be performed here that are not accommodated in the drop-down version.

Once you are happy with the mappings/SQL, press Next to show a preview of what items are going to be created and the additional information:

You can see the rows in blue are new items that will be created if you click the synchronise button. Modified values/cells (where the item value is different from the source data and SharpCloud) will be shown in orange.

Synchronise: Press this button to actually commit the changes to the SharpCloud story. If the commit is successful it will show a summary of the changes made.

Delete Records from story (Default = true): The default setting for this option is true which means deleted records from your data source (Excel workbook in this case) will be also be deleted in SharpCloud. E.g. if your data source contains records for items A, B and C, and later the data source only contains A and C, item B will be deleted from SharpCloud.

When you are happy that your connector is transferring the right data in the right way, you can “Publish” it. A published connector cannot be edited anymore, and can be run by anyone who has admin access to the story.

Note: The credentials of the user who published the connector are used to read from the data source and update the story.

Once a connector is published it can be batched to run automatically on and hourly or daily schedule. This is possible with Excel Online.