Parse Excel to Calendar Screen

[Anonymous]

 Hello friend,

I am starting working with Powerapps and I would like to ask for your help to correctly approach the following problem.

I have an excel file with data representing business trips, columns being:

1. Person
2. Date From
3. Date To
4. Other info

At this moment I need to make a Powerapps front-end for this file. I have a plan to use the Calendar Screen, which OnStart parses the file and shows all events for the current user also allowing him to edit/add data.

Q1: As far as I understood, excel file located on One Drive for Business allows multiple app users to read AND to write to the same file. Am I correct?

Q2: What kind of formulas would you suggest to parse the file? I feel a weak spot in the fact the calendar looks for a single-day=single-event style, and I have a date range format.

Q3: Having in mind that currently I need to use an excel as a data source/destination, any other approaches that I should consider for this task?

Thank you for the help!

[v-yutliu-msft]

Hi @Anonymous ,

1)Yes, you could set the same excel file as multiple apps' data source.

Also, one app could have multiple data sources too.

2)As I do not know what functions that you want in details, I could not give you formula directly.

Usually, we use search/filter/lookup function to filter data. You could use these functions to filter events based on the selected data.

What's more, you could refer Calendar screen which may have some functions that you want.

But its data source is office365 outlook, so some functions not work with excel file.

3)Using excel is ok. But if you use office365 outlook, it have more functions about calendar directly. It will be easier. You could consider this connector.

Here's a doc about  office365 outlook connector for your reference:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/office365/

What's more, about excel file, you need to notice delegation problem.

As Excel is not a delegateable data source, if your record is larger than 2000, you may get wrong result.

If your record is smaller than 2000, you just need to change this limit to 2000.

Here's a doc about delegation for your reference:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/canvas-apps/delegation-overview

Best regards,