SpreadsheetWEB now has its own connector: the SpreadsheeWEB Connector!
Excel’s external references allow creating references for the contents of a range or cell in other workbooks that are in the user’s computer. This way, you can pull data and calculations from another workbook, and use them in your active spreadsheet. This can be useful when you have several data models already in place, and just want to use those without incorporating them in your current workbook. However, this approach can cause more issues than the problems it aims to solve. For example, you need to make sure that other users opening this workbook have the other files on their machine and in exactly the same directory as you. This approach also means that you must open all referenced workbooks for the calculations to work both ways.
The SpreadsheetWEB Connector does pretty much the same thing, but with everything inside the SpreadsheetWEB ecosystem. This alleviates some of the common issues Excel’s external references suffer from. You can upload the workbook that is to be used with the connector as a web service, and then create a SpreadsheetWEB Connector in the main application.
Say you have a designer application (Term Life Comparison in this example) that compares plans from three different companies. Once the web services are up on your account, you can then create three SpreadsheetWEB Connectors to send the input data for the main application (Term Life Comparison) to the web services, and retrieve the results. You can create a new SpreadsheetWEB Connector from the Connectors interface, and map the named ranges from the web service with those in your workbook. Once the new connectors are ready, you can assign them into an Action Button. When a user clicks the Action Button, the system will automatically send their inputs, and get the results.
Another exciting feature added in this version is the Super Headers. Excel’s cell layout allows easily creating tables with pretty much any structure. You can add months or years over a table that consists of data of daily operations. This way, users can easily distinguish between sections of the table. The input and output grids in designer applications have been pushing the limits of building responsive tables on web applications, and with the introduction of Super Headers, you can now do the same thing on SpreadsheetWEB, and create additional higher-level headers in your input and output grids. Super Headers accept pretty much any layout on top of your grids, and you can add them simply by assigning the high-level range another named range – the system will take care of the rest! Assume that you have a table like below.
All you need to do is assign a named range to the top headers, enable Super Headers, and select that named range.
You can now build sophisticated tables in designer applications without any CSS wizardry.
Aside from some bug fixes and performance improvements, we’ve also added support for dynamic header names, exporting chart data in CSV format in designer applications, and also the ability to assign an external URL to page links in runtime. We hope that you’ll like these amazing new features as much as we do! For a full list of changes, updates, and new features, please see the change log.
Sign up for a 14-day free account if you haven’t already done so, and start creating web applications using only your Excel workbooks in no time.
