Forum Discussion
Migrate Excel files with a lot of links to SharePoint Online?
- AnonymousJan 25, 2018
This is quite problematic for our users too, a lot of users got caught out by creating spreadsheets in OneDrive sync folder on their machine, linking there and then sharing the files. The Excel has a link reference to C:\user\<name>\One Drive - <Tenant Name>\Test.xlsx etc But of course the person using the file does not have access that persons c: drive so the <name> bit doesn't exist on their local drive.
Links to https:\\<onedrive location> tend to also be a little slow.
So its tricky, plus links like this can easily break spreadsheets and cause errors. I'm not sure I can count the times that someone has come to me asking me to check their spreadsheet because they think it might be wrong but they can't see where the issue is. Normally its a link or copying down etc.
If it was me, I would use the new feature built into Excel called PowerQuery, on the data tab, using SharePoint Folder link and avoid using links all together ... but this is a lot of work to change, but the long term benefits are huge.
This effectively queries the other spreadsheet, using a simple interface, so no need for vloopup or linking or calculations in the spreadsheet ... all calculations can be done in the query, so they are repeatable and difficult to break. Plus as a bonus, if you copy the query which it builds it can be pasted into PowerBI and you can create dashboards very quickly that are available anywhere.
Did anyone find a good way to handle this?
Hi,
as document migration is controlled process (I hope ;)) you always know what is/was your source location and what will be new location. In case that you use ReplaceMagic you have two options:
- you fix your files before you move them to new location. Here you'll basically specify what is source location (like \\serverABC) and what will be new location (like, https://company.sharepoint.com) and let ReplaceMagic do the job
- or you copy everything to SP.Online and then do the same thing again
Of course, there are variations like you copy documents from source location to some temporary storage, fix them (again search for source, replace with new location) and upload them to SP.Online
Key here is that you know what you copying and where you are copying (source-target relation).
ReplaceMagic is used by tons of customers and majority of migrations are now going direction SharePoint.Online (occasionally to SharePoint on-prem) so with RM can achieve your targets.
Plus price tag is very, very competitive to other tools :). You can check prices over https://www.replacemagic.com/store.aspx