New versions of ChatGPT work well with the open internet. The New Plugin Marketplace helps us consume data from third-party sources that site back to that source. In addition, ChatGPT has plugins for core Microsoft Stack products, such as Microsoft Teams & Microsoft Excel
can I create a new Microsoft Excel file with openpyxl? can I create with xlsxwriter and open with opepyxl?
I am presently using Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel on SharePoint so that I can share stored data and allow data input with users. I need to add simpler input forms, process documentation, attachments, analytics-light and storage as well. I also would like to have mobile data input and retrieval. Retool seems to offer what I need and as there will be less than 10 users, the pricing seems affordable.
I'm looking for any recommendations of this or alternate software.
Thank you
Brian
Hi Brian,
Dom here, co-founder of Five, a low-code company.
The first question I'd ask is this: do you want to continue using Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel as your database? If yes, then indeed Retool is a great choice because it connects to Google Sheets and lets you build a front end on top of it. An alternative could be AppSheet, which belongs to Google and does the same as Retool.
My advice, however, would be not to use a spreadsheet as a database. I won't go into all the reasons for this. But a spreadsheet is not designed to support web applications. At some point, it will either become very slow or you will struggle with data integrity, especially if you have ten users reading & writing data concurrently. That's why I'd look for an online database application builder.
Now, this is where I'm biased, given my role at Five, but here's what Five lets you do:
You can create your own MySQL database straight inside Five. So instead of storing data in a spreadsheet, you store it in a web-hosted MySQL database. You can import CSV files into your database, so your existing data won't be lost. You can then build the front end on top of the MySQL database. The advantages: you get something that is scalable and won't break in the future. And MySQL is open-source, so even if at some point in the future, you won't go elsewhere with your application, your data is portable.
Hope this helps and as I said, think about the right back end for your application first. :)
Dom
Hi Brian! Based on your requirements, I’d strongly suggest giving Retool a try. It excels at having the pre-assembled components library which lets you put together apps in a breeze. It scales with your needs and the medium plan should be quite sufficient for a while. I’m helping companies with their use of Retool as part of my business: www.blackholeconsulting.net
Hope this recommendation helps! Cheers, Stephan
Hey everyone, My users love Microsoft Excel, and so do I. I've been making tools for them in the form of workbooks for years, these tools usually have databases included in the spreadsheets or communicate to free APIs around the web, but now I want to distribute these tools in the form of Excel Add-ins for several reasons.
I want these Add-ins to communicate to a personal server to authorize users, read from my databases, and write to them while they're using their Excel environment. I have never built a website, so what would be a good solution for this, considering I'm new to all of these technologies? I know about the existence of Microsoft Azure, Microsoft SharePoint, and Google Sheets, but I don't know how to feel about those.
Just definitely don't use firebase. All of MongoDB, MySQL, MariaDB and PostGreSQL have a lot of community support and history.
Snowflake is a NoSQL database in the cloud, which also accepts SQL calls. Users can obtain an ODBC driver for SnowFlake, which would allow your Excel apps to write/read from the backend, locally.
I'm a student, and I have a project to build an application (Visual analytics tool) that takes a Microsoft Excel file, cleans the data, and visualizes it. Also, the app should allow the user to filter and interact with it.
1- should I make it desktop application or web application? : I'm leaning toward (desktop)
2- D3.js OR Python?
3- better excel or CSV?
I'm a beginner Inspiration for interaction and look of the app: eventflow application.
I would specifically recommend basing your application on Pandas which will handle the vast majority of the work for you. You will be amazed at what you will be able to get done with only a few lines of code.
Pandas can load the data from either Excel xslx files or csv files (and a lot of other places)
If you structure your code well you can have a cross platform command line program, a GUI desktop program, a Jupyter Notebook and a web service all with the vast majority of the code in common.
A jupyter notebook is a great place to start developing your code and may be all that you need.
Some plug-ins & resources that can help: - pandas-summary (for a rapid overview of the data): https://github.com/mouradmourafiq/pandas-summary - pandasgui (for exploring what you would like to do): https://github.com/adamerose/pandasgui - Pandas-Bokeh (plotting): https://github.com/PatrikHlobil/Pandas-Bokeh - plot.ly (plotting): https://plotly.com/python/pandas-backend/ - wxPython (for a desktop GUI): https://wxpython.org/
