Holidays Forecast

[JUM]

Hello,

Today, we manage the forecast of holidays in a consolidated Excel Files from all our employees (around 100 tab in an Excel Sheet)

We would like to use a PowerApp to, in a first time, view all the forecasts (one tab per user)

All our employees have an Office 365 account.

Do you know if it is possible to manage it with PowerApps?

Thank you very much for your support, Julien Martinelli

[Meneghino]

Hi @JUM

Yes, I think it is possible to manage and view employee leave with PowerApps.

I have done that for my (small) company and it works fine.  I use SharePoint to store the data on employee leave.

You could alternatively use CDS.

The advantage of using SharePoint is that you can create Excel reporting directly.

Happy to give more concrete guidance if needed.

[JUM]

HI @Meneghino!

Thank you for your answer.

I am a newbie in PowerApps but I do feel that it can be helpful for this topic. Happy to see that you already managed to display employee leave using this interface.

We do not use Sharepoint as database, but Excel directly where we have a calendar per employee.

Perhaps, the app, in a first time, could be useful by displaying the right Excel tab (Around 100 tabs)

Our first data model could be

EMPLOYEE

 Employee Name

 Employee Initials

  Entity Name

   |

ENTITY

 Entity Name

To store this kind of information, i do think that we must use CDS.

The app should display a "google bar" to find an employee. Then we could use a click to open the tab of the employee in an Excel file.

Thank you to the communauty for feedbacks and experience, specifically on managing Excel Files with PowerApps.

Julien

[Meneghino]

Hi @JUM

What you say seems sensible, please let me know if you need any specific help.

[JUM]

Hello,

I used CDS to load my data and would like to OPEN an excel sheet from PowerApps.

Thank you for your support, Julien

[Meneghino · Accepted solution]

Hi @JUM

You can open an Excel sheet by using the Launch(Link to Excel sheet) command in PowerApps, but this will just open the file, it will not populate it with any date.

Currently I think that you cannot use CDS data as a source for the Get&Transform of Excel, so you are stuck with getting the data from CDS into Excel.

But some of these things may be possible in the future.

Why do you need to open the Excel from PowerApps?  Maybe there is another way of doing what you need.

[JUM]

Hi @Meneghino,

Thank you very much. The command Launch works.

We manage our holidays forecast in a big Excel with one tab per employee. 

To begin with Powerapps, i plan to have an application with a drop down list of all the employees opening the right tab in our Excel file.

To go further, you are right, we must design a database around calendars, people, holiday forecast...

We could build this database in CDS.

I am sure that this kind of app managing holidays, activity reports, holiday forecast will be developped and proposed as template soon.

We use office 365 and we have around 150 active accounts.

I keep you informed.

Julien

[Meneghino]

OK, thank you @JUM

If I were you I would go straight to the correct solution without trying to do a hybrid PowerApps/Excel.

With today's release of the new version of PowerApps, basically almost anything can be done.

Best regards.