Connect to Sharepoint Excel

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

I'm relatively new to power app. 

I understand that Excel Online (Business) is a relatively new connector that allows linking of data to excel on sharepoint. 

I was tasked with creating a userform interphase that would allow the data keyed in the powerapp to be trasnferred over to the excel linked in sharepoint. However, I'm facing difficulties in linking the excel  file to powerapp. I had done the following steps.

1. I had clicked on the excel online icon

 2. It led me to this page and I tried adding a new connection, but the excel online option wasn't present.

I'm not sure on how to move on from here.

Any assistance would be appreciated!

[WarrenBelz]

@Maxim_EU .

If you have SharePoint, make a List for the data and it will work so much better than an Excel Table.

[Maxim_EU]

"so much better than an Excel Table" Uhm, does is now? I'm unsure of what your statement means..

So far I'm getting very annoyed.., now I'm stuck with the date and time format, I would like to see the following format JJMMDD HH:MM.., no joy. Way to complex apparently..   I imagine this is not what you meant.
No problem with a different date and time format in Excel!

Not to start about a consistent 24 hour format..

I do appreciate your quick reply, thank you!

On a more serious note:

I'm researching how my clients can continue to work as the have always done in Excel or an alternatives without too much limitations. I keep getting stuck, my simplest ideas are way too much.

.. and I'm never ever going to tell a client what you just mentioned to me 😉
They hire me to work with what they created.
It seems that I need to start focusing on an automated conversion of some sorts, to a dumbed down the data sheet. I do not think I'm going to do that. 

[WarrenBelz]

@Maxim_EU ,

This is an old thread and Excel has gained some capability since then, but as a Database, Excel is a good Spreadsheet. When you are dealing with Power Apps, the more robust the database (which Power Apps uses for data storage, but does all the calculations and queries itself), the better, particularly when it comes to Delegation capability, record numbers and dates (I am not sure on your comment on date/time as that is another issue with Excel). The only "function" of Excel used by Power Apps is a named Table range with the columns as fields and the rows as records with a very limited field format.

If you want to pay for the Premium connectors for Dataverse or Azure SQL, then you will have an even better system, but with the "no extra cost" (I won't call it free)  capabilities of O365, SharePoint is a far better and capable "backend" than Excel and my advice from experience is to not even consider unless you have no other choice (SharePoint Lists not available to you).

[ninjaryder1st]

Thank you for your response.   Is this to say that an Excel document (with table format) is stored in a Sharepoint Site (Or Teams site as sharepoint site in background) cannot be connected to PowerApps for a data source?   We'd literally have to move the document from Teams/Sharepoint storage (in cloud) to our own OneDrive for Business account (also in cloud)?   Why did Msft not make this available direclty from Shared Teams/SP sites?

[BostonSailor]

@ninjaryder1st  Excel files in a SharePoint site can absolutely be accessed by PowerApps. I do it all the time for in-house apps used by hundreds of people every day. The "Excel Online (Business)" is the connector I use.  Most of my PowerApps tables are SharePoint lists, as these have better performance and tend to work better when there are lots of different users doing updates. Most of my Excel files are effectively read-only, but they do work for updates as well. One thing I did find is that when I started this, the Excel files were hosted on our very-old corporate SharePoint site, which we have not upgraded in a while. Accessing Excel files on this site did not work. But we also have many departmental and "Teams" SharePoint sites, and Excel files stored there work just fine. 

tl;dr PowerApps can access Excel files stored on SharePoint libraries using the Excel Online (Business) connector.