dynamic import data from Excel

[Marcus B]

I'm completely a newbie in infopath, so I just try to figure out weather it's
helpful for my forms I want to create.

My situation is:
We have a lot of excel sheets which are used to summarize data from excel
and other tools and display it in a printable form for a daily report to the
manager. It's simple but it works.
The thing that bothers me with these forms is, that when you want to add in
some cells additional comments it could ruin the whole design because you may
have to change the cell size and so on..

Designing the forms in infopath worked fine, but I struggle with recieving
some specific information form the excel sheets. They are pretty huge and
with complex connections and calcualtions within them, that's why I don't
think it makes sense to change something on them or rebuilt them in an other
application.

I can make a connection to databases, xml files, etc. Is there a easy way to
retrieve data from a simple excel file?

thanks in advance for all replies!

 

[Scott L. Heim [MSFT]]

Hi Marcus,

I think you have contradicted yourself:

From: "They are pretty huge and with complex connections and calculations
within them"

To: "Is there an easy way to retrieve data from a simple excel file?"

<VBG>

As you have seen, InfoPath can work with XML files so the first step will
be to save your Excel files as XML files. However, it may not be "that
simple" to get that data into InfoPath. InfoPath can display data in a
hierarchical format whereas Excel cannot so depending on how things are
designed in Excel you may still need to do some "massaging" to get this
into InfoPath.

At any rate, the first step is to get the data from Excel into an XML file.

Best regards,

Scott L. Heim
Microsoft Developer Support

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