Is it possible to work with excel files that's inside a sharepoint's document folder?

[Anonymous]

Hello! I just got hired in a energy distribution company in the maintenance sector. They all use microsoft softwares for everything so I'm adapting to it.

This last month I started working with B.I and PowerApps, but I'm currently working on a project which is an inside app for the teams working on the field. Basically the idea is for them to fill out forms inside the powerapp instead of physicall forms.

The idea is that this forms would be filled inside the app, and after completing it, it would get stored inside a spreadsheet and this spreadsheet would be used to feed power b.i reports later on.

I've tried using OneDrive Excel online, which is pretty straightforward the solution for this, but it didnt look good because there are way too many workers that would need to be given the access to those files individually. So I'm looking for a cleaner way to store information in a way that I don't need to specify permissions to every file that would be accessed internally by the app. 

So I decided to use a sharepoint url, because all workers have access to the files automatically, but I could not find a way to actually load the excel files there are inside the document folders, only get the metadate of the files.

Any ideas? Thank u in advance!!

[TheRobRush · Accepted solution]

If you have very large number of employees utilizing your app, run far far away from excel as a datasource. Seriously before you get so far into it that it would take you weeks to migrate everything over, switch to SharePoint lists. 3 years ago when I started utilizing this at our business we started with Excel as the datasource as well, then slowly realized (even with only about 6 employees at a time using it) that every time two employees happened to edit the data at the same time one of them would fail and lose their data. Only one user can access excel as a datasource at a time, and everyone else gets locked out. 

[Anonymous]

Thank you for your reply really I appreciate it.

I'll definitely switch to lists, gonna learn about them now!

There are about 4 teams of 5-6 electricians that would be using my app. My goal is to grow this project for the entire department so yeah it would be an issue.