Pushing or serving real-time data to an excel spreadsheet

Posted by evan_irl on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by evan_irl
Published on 2011-01-13T04:47:58Z Indexed on 2011/01/13 4:53 UTC
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I am running some test automation on a networked computer resource (remote). The remote computer running the test automation generates some output, which I can customize however I wish - probably a text or excel file.

I would like to create an excel spreadsheet which, from my local machine, monitors this output and provides real-time analytics. Later I would make the networked computer visible to more people, and they can use the same spreadsheet to monitor this output.

My problem is that this networked computer is located on the other side of the earth, and so using any kind of polling in excel VBA to PULL the data from the networked computer results in a very long wait with the pinwheel spinning, making the sheet clumsy and less useful. The same thing happens when I use excel's built in function for linking to "external resources"

Is there any way to PUSH data to the excel spreadsheet from the networked computer? Something that is easy to set up would be ideal, the latency does not have to be low, so long as there is no awkward "busy wait" while the sheet updates. If that is not possible, is there any way of using PULL from the excel sheet that avoids the same busy wait?

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