Mashup with External Data in Zoho Sheet
Ramesh July 18, 2008 09: 46 am
Zoho Sheet has this “Link External Data” functionality, which can be used to mashup with data on the web. It can sync your Zoho spreadsheet with data in public CSV files, HTML tables and RSS feeds. Zoho Sheet will basically fetch data periodically from the configured URL and update the spreadsheet automatically. You can then analyze on the external data by applying formulas or drawing charts. You can also publish / embed the resultant chart or a specific range or the whole spreadsheet. It gives you ample possibilities to mashup data from the web. A word of caution: While fetching data periodically from external websites, especially HTML pages, make sure you agree to the terms and conditions of the website.
Here is a short presentation which walks you through the various steps involved in configuring External Data in Zoho Sheet. It takes an example of automatic import of data from a public Zoho Creator view. The same can be done on a private Zoho Creator view by enabling private permalinks in Zoho Creator.
(view the presentation in full screen for better clarity)
Are you using this feature already? If so, let us know how you are using it.
Popularity: 20% [?]
You might want to look into adding support for XBRL data.
Is there a way for the spreadsheet to store all the old data from, say, an RSS feed as well as pull in the new data? Or will the new RSS information always replace the old listings?
Hi Sharon, Currently it doesn’t store all the old data from an RSS feed. It will always replace the old listings. Basically it will replace the old data with whatever is present in the RSS feed XML at that point of time.
Hi, have you had any luck with updating the HTML parser on this?
It doesn’t grab the table data very well.
Awesome feature tho, and will be massive step once the kinks are ironed out.
Cheers,
LO
if you havent seen my feedback on this btw, try linking to this site and see the difference in what is returned: http://slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Currency
Regards,
LO
Hi Logansan,
We do have some limitation in our html parsing technique. We do consider/show only the inner most tables (if a table lies with in a table, parent table will be left out) and also we do consider only the tables with more than one row.These two criteria are reason for the issue in your case as few tables have inner table and few have only one row. We will enhance our parser in future to handle these scenarios.
regards,
Vaseekaran
There is something I don’t understand with this. I have a csv import but when information is updated from the CSV site the embedded chart does not update. Indeed, I actually have to log in to my Zoho sheet to see any changes. It does not help if the embedded chart is static or that the update only happens when I log in.
Hi Fox,
The embedded chart should be dynamic if you have drawn the chart over the cells populated from the csv site. To look into the issue could you please share the document to support@zohosheet.com?
regards,
Vaseekaran