Sharepoint List From Excel with bi-directional updating?

Copper Contributor

I'm a newbie to Sharepoint and Teams but have been playing around with Sharepoint Lists and I understand that you can create a list from an existing spreadsheet. However I need a little more than that.

 

Currently we use three different spreadsheets which broadly contain the same data (with a few variations) and are used for different purposes. Two of these I know I can combine into one Sharepoint list quite simply and just create different views. The remaining one is a bit different. This one is used by my boss and in it he issues the job number, job details, progress of the job and costings and invoicing.

 

What I would like to do is to have a list that has all the columns and data pertaining to the job number, details and progress to be taken from my bosses spreadsheet but that it also has additional columns that are from the other two spreadsheets.

 

Users then update the Sharepoint list but when they do so, it also updates my bosses spreadsheet in the relevant cells and when my boss adds a new job to his spreadsheet, it creates a new item on the sharepoint list for everyone else.

 

Is this even remotely possible? I'm guessing no as I can't find any mention of this as a function.

1 Reply

@OJohnson 

The two way sync between SharePoint and any generated lists was removed in SharePoint 2007, a very long time ago.  Microsoft did come up with an Excel add-in for Excel 2007 & SharePoint 2007 that's still floating about that may be of some use for you.  If I can find it, I'll edit the post with the link otherwise the solution was documented on Code Project on this link.

 

A better way may be to have the manager simply maintain the SharePoint list rather than a spreadsheet.  Any spreadsheet generated from SharePoint does retain a data connection to the parent list.  The refresh frequency can be configured in Excel to pull down any edits to the source list on a frequent basis.