Quickly automate data imports from Excel

Reading time: 3 minutes

Excel is an essential tool for many businesses and is used in a wide range of industries to help power their operations. That said, it is easy to understand why many businesses and processes have Excel at their core.

Linx allows the user to quickly access the data stored in Excel spreadsheets and use it elsewhere. Using the Excel plugin, you can read the data and use it any way you need to. 

 

Read the Excel spreadsheet

To read an Excel file in Linx, add the Excel plugin and then use the Excel Read function. You will need to specify the file path (which can be fully dynamic) and the range (either a specific range in a spreadsheet or the entire spreadsheet)

This gif shows how to quickly read an excel file with Linx
After the data is available to read, it can be used in any number of back-end tasks:
  • Make changes to the data (apply transformations)
  • Import the data into a database or other datastore
  • Make the data available via API
  • Create new artifacts from the data, such as reports

Data usage examples

A simple example is needing to quickly load data from an Excel spreadsheet to automate data capture for future storage and processing purposes (or for any other reason).

To do so, Linx will read the data directly from the Excel spreadsheet and insert it into a database table. 

Insert the data read from an excel file Into a database tabe
The process can further be automated by using a DirectoryWatch service that will watch a directory and trigger events when a file is added to the folder. By doing so, the file will be processed as soon as the file is available. This will make your ETLs or automated data capture processes far quicker to build. 

A more advanced example is to read data from an Excel worksheet that contains products, customer-related data and orders. A report is compiled and created and then emailed to the client:

Use data from an Excel file to generate a PDF repot
The created process is hosted on the Linx server, where it can be kicked off based on any configuration you specify. 

About the Linx Server:
The Server is a Windows Service that hosts and manages your Linx Solutions and web services. You can install Linx Server on the hardware of your choice (on-premise or cloud) with monitoring, metrics and logging as standard.

Further reading: Installing the Linx Server

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