Integrating Excel and Formstack
One of our beta users works in the property services department of a large organisation. He focuses on compliance, working to ensure that all of the properties his department manages are maintained to the required standards.
As part of his job, he has to feed raw data collected by a surveying team into a set of Excel spreadsheets. The department organizes these sheets in Sharepoint and then uses them to build Business Intelligence dashboards. The surveying team uses Formstack to compile reports; they use tablets to access the forms on the go, as they conduct site visits.
Before they used Zapier and Glue42, the process was to manually dump all the reporting data into the relevant Excel spreadsheets before moving on to work on the modelling required for the BI dashboards. Working with data from over 80 sites meant that this data transfer took up a lot of time.
The user was able to set up a Zap integrating Formstack with Excel to automate this process. New responses in the forms are now Zapped into the spreadsheet that he uses for BI dashboarding. This means he can spend more time on reporting and analysis, instead of losing hours lifting data between Formstack and Excel.
Managing user pins with Excel and Gmail
We’ve simplified the description of this use case; we want to focus on the workflow rather than the complexities of managing secure user credentials. An organisation has a spreadsheet with user names, email addresses and a pin code that it assigns to users to access certain functions. The pin code is generated using some ancient VBA code that creates the pin from a hash of the user’s name and the current date and time. The same VBA also inserts the pin into a security database which is used when the user accesses the functions. No-one wants to change this, as it works, but manually editing the pin into an email and sending it to the user is a potential source of errors.
Using Zapier with Glue42 Excel lets them automatically send an email through Gmail whenever the pin is changed. The Glue42 ‘Row Updated’ trigger initiates an action in Gmail, uses the email address column for the “To” field of the email and inserts the new pin code into the body of the email, wrapped in appropriate text. The user name column is also inserted into the body of the email to personalise it.
“Dear,
Your new pin code is
Best regards
The support team”
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