Sharing Data From Excel as OData with FlatMerge

Reposted from Chris Webb's blog with the author's permission.

At last, the Excel 2013 app I've really been waiting for! Those data visualization apps from last week have generated a lot of interest, but this is even cooler for a data geek like me.

A few months ago I came across FlatMerge, a startup that allows you to upload data and then make it available as an OData feed; I was going to blog about it but my fellow OData fan Jamie Thomson beat me to it. However at that point it was only a website where you could upload data. today, FlatMerge released its own, free (for the time being) Excel 2013 app which allows you to upload data direct from Excel. So you can take data from an Excel table:

Save it to FlatMerge:

And then import it into Excel 2013, PowerPivot, Data Explorer or any tool that supports OData feeds. Here's the URL for the table I just uploaded (which, if I've read the docs correctly, should be publicly available):

https://fmsecure.azurewebsites.net/Data/oData/a5462e03-e0bc-44b4-a654-5dbbbd59cb59

It's still a version 1.0 and there are a few features it's missing that I'd like to see (like the ability to update a data source, and to control who has access to that data), but I think it's very cool. I've seen tools that allow you to share data from Excel before but this is the first that uses OData, and this means you have a much greater degree of flexibility about how you consume your data. Arguably you could do the same thing by saving your Excel file to Sharepoint 2013 Excel Services and using the OData feed from an Excel Services table, but that's a much more expensive and less user-friendly option.

I can imagine a whole bunch of uses for this, for example in a budgeting application where multiple Excel users need to submit their figures, which then need to be consolidated in a single Excel spreadsheet, maybe using Data Explorer.

Chris has been working with Microsoft BI tools since he started using beta 3 of OLAP Services back in the late 90s. Since then he has worked with Analysis Services in a number of roles (including three years spent with Microsoft Consulting Services) and he is now an independent consultant specialising in complex MDX, Analysis Services cube design and Analysis Services query performance problems. His company website can be found at http://www.crossjoin.co.uk and his blog can be found at http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/ .