API for linking MS Excel to SMARTSHEET

Greetings

I am handling a number of projects and making Gantt charts to track their progress.

The data for these charts are stored in MS Excel sheets on my local drive. It becomes cumbersome to manually import the dates and numbers to update the Gantt chart. I want to know, if there is way I can circumvent this problem.

I was thinking if writing a code to read and write from my Excel files to update the Gantt charts would be possible so that, every time a change is made in the excel sheet, the Gantt chart gets updated. 

Since Smartsheet is a cloud based platform, I would have to save my Excel sheets in Onedrive or Dropbox write? Or is it possible to link my Excel sheet when it is present in my Local C Drive ? 

I am relatively amateur at coding, so I am having difficulties understanding the terms in this link: https://smartsheet-platform.github.io/api-docs/

Please let me know if APIs can be used to solve this problem.

Thank you

Comments

  • dAVE Inden
    dAVE Inden Employee

    The Smartsheet API can help you to get data in and out of the sheets in your account. The documentation you linked to goes over each of the requests available. Along with that you would need look into Excel development to see how to build applications within Excel which Microsoft has resources for learning.

    In the Smartsheet documentation we have a Getting Started section that is helpful to go over making your first requests to the API. I suggest starting there and see how you can make your first request to get the data of a sheet.

  • Hi

    About the Excel Development part, will that be helpful for linking Excel to Smartsheet?

    Because Smartsheet is the application I am more concerned about. Only my data is present on multiple Excel sheets

     

    Thank you

  • dAVE Inden
    dAVE Inden Employee

    If you are looking to read the data in your Excel files and and write new data there as well you'll need some method of connecting to Excel to do that. The Smartsheet API will only handle the Smartsheet side of your process for reading and writing data there.

    The Excel Development resource I gave you is a starting point. Depending on the programming language you are using to build your application there may be a third party library that allows you to read and write data in Excel. I'd suggest doing some research on how to work with data in Excel in your programming language.

  • Thank you very much. Now it is clear!

  • Richard Rymill SBP
    Richard Rymill SBP ✭✭✭✭✭✭

    Hi CS.

    As consultants we get asked for this all the time so have developed an "App" t do this for you... ie automatically send data from Excel into Smartsheet to update existing fields. 

    Happy to demo and it is low cost as it is selling in some volume. 

    On the other hand if you wish to do this yourself, at least you know it is possible if a little detailed and time consuming to set it up for the first time. 

    Richardr 

    Smarter Business Processs.