How do I use the Excel Plugin to display data from an external source?

[Thomas Hardin]

I've been working with the Excel Plugin to display worksheets from files that I've attached to Confluence. However, the data on the files can change daily, so I would like to know if there is a way to use the Plugin to my advantage.

We have resources today that can build reports for us, so there is no reason to recreate the wheel. I just need to be able to keep that same data updated in Confluence without having to change anything.

Also, I do have Bob's Excel add on, but could use some help there. Is the any "How to" documentation for this?

[Adrien Ragot 2]

Hi Thomas,

First, try the Sharepoint Connector. If it's a little useful for you this time, and if you have Sharepoint in your company, it may be useful later again.

The second reason I asked this is, I've developed a tool to manage data inside of Confluence, most probably the kind of data you want to manage. If your stakeholders would be happy to update their figures in Confluence, the Play SQL Spreadsheets plugin is what you need. You'll be able to join data from several tables, make custom reports and, yes, comment on them. It uses a database, so if you need to synchronize back to Sharepoint, you can write a script for that.

Last suggestion that comes to my mind, there is Bob Swift's CLI which you can use to automatically create Confluence pages. You would have to deal with extracting the data from the Excel spreadsheet.

Synchronizing data from two sources is hard and I hope one of those solutions will suit you.

[Thomas Hardin]

Thanks Adrien! The source is a sharepoint site where we have rsources that pull the data and can create different reporting options for us. I did figure out how to use the Excel plugin that bob created to link to the worksheets, so I'm able to pull them in and display the updated changes. However, I came across another situation where I need to add additional data to those worksheets.

Example: My technical team mambers need to make comments on the worksheets, but can't becasue they don't have access to the sharepoint site. I can have a comments section added to the worksheet, have it linked to confluence, but how can I enable the team to add comments and then have those update the worksheet on sharepoint?

Is there a Sharepoint Plugin that could work?

[Adrien Ragot 2]

Hi Thomas,

How is it going with your issue? Do you know Confluence uses WebDAV? Perhaps you could have a process copy the file everyday into the WebDAV folder of Confluence, so it is attached to the page automatically?

What is the original source of the data? Sometimes data comes from a database or is maintained manually by the issuer, and perhaps they would be ok with inserting it in an SQL source which can be read in Confluence.

Good luck for your use-case. Adrien.