Schedule Dataset Refresh from Excel Spreadsheet

Branden Pavol

Organization Name

Worthington Industries

Description

In OAC 6.0, the ability to schedule dataset refreshes was introduced but only for certain dataset types.  A dataset created from an excel spreadsheet is unable to be refreshed automatically.  So any report built from the spreadsheet will only be as updated as when it was originally uploaded.  There needs to be a way (like Tableau and Power BI have) to refresh the dataset without having to manually upload the spreadsheet each time.  

Use Case and Business Need

There needs to be an option to schedule a dataset created from a spreadsheet

More details

Trying to convert a dashboard created in Tableau to OAC is proving to be impossible due to this restriction

Original Idea Number: 55707f3cb0

Michal Zima

Another option for regular update/refresh of data set based on Excel/CSV file (which is not stored in Dropbox/Google Drive) would be to have complete/documented API (REST API) for DV (which is urgently needed as discussed in another Ideas/Posts) and if one of the method of REST-API would be upload/reload of file-based data set, we could then use this API method for scheduled refresh of file-based data set.

Gabby Rubin-Oracle

As far as I know, none of the products that you mentioned is able to auto-refresh data from files within their cloud offering. It is true that when running as a desktop product, some will be able to do it based on the fact that it is all local files, but even for Tableau users the best practice was always Alterix. We are actually looking into a few things like refresh from services like dropbox or refresh from cloud storage and even create data flows with a folder as a source, but we do not have defined projects around it. We are planning to release a REST API connector later this year, but expect the data to be included in the response and not a file pointer. That might come later on.