Background process: Is it possible to refresh an excel worksheet table that is connected to sharepoint?

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1

So I’m trying to see if it’s possible to refresh an excel spreadsheet that has a table that is connected to a sharepoint list, as a background process? I’d like to take the refreshed information and populate it into a queue for processing.

I currently run a foreground process that runs a refresh macro in the spreadsheet and then it reads the updated info and adds it to a queue. But it occupies a runtime doing this.

I know I could use a power apps license to have an api anytime the sharepoint is updated to add the info directly to the orchestrator queue. But we don’t have any power apps licenses.

So yea just seeing if it’s possible by doing it with a background process instead of a foreground process.

Any help or info is appreciated!

2

Hi @davidgoderre

You can use the Offcie365 Official or the sharepoint activities to directly read the sharepoint data

Alternately, you can run macro as well to get the data by setting excel processing to automation mode which wont open excel, but yes refresh of data will be little slow. So I would suggest use sharepoint activities instead

cheers

3

Interesting. I’ll have to check out the sharepoint activities.
Do you know though if they can be ran in a background process type as opposed to a foreground process?

4

Hi @davidgoderre

We use it and it is completely background. If you have office365 details then you can use

Happy automation

Cheers

5

Awesome! Ok I’ll check this out and see if I can get it setup and running to make the connection to our sharepoint list.

1 Like
6

so I followed the instructions in this video for setting up the Office 365 scope. but I am getting an error when performing the Get List Info activity.

Is there something I am missing in order to read the sharepoint list info?

7

Hi @davidgoderre ,

First for office scope you need app id tenant id and required authetication details

Once you have them then for list ypu need to give url and list name

Https://www.Sharepoint.com/name/list/listname

Then your url will be https://www.sharepoint.com/name
And listname will be the name that you need to give this gives list info only.

The output of liat info activity is to be passed to for eeach item in list to access list items

Cheera

8

Only thing i can think of is that the URL is not correct. How do i get the correct URL?

Should my url have allitems.aspx at the end?

9

Hi @davidgoderre ,

Your url should not contain anything from the word list…anything before it is the url that you need to use.

Cheers