Update excel online workbook links automatically

Question

I have two excel workbooks, 1 for managers and 1 for employees both are excel online (SharePoint). They contain time off information. The manager portion has all kinds of manager information that each employee does not need to know about. The employee workbook has a portion of the information so that employees can plan time off. They can look at this workbook and see that there are 4 of 8 employees that already have a certain day off and will likely need to choose another day off. They can also review what the manager sees as to their proposed and past time off.

The manager puts data in on their workbook and the employee workbook has links in it to reflect the manager's information. How can I update the employee side without the user having to choose update since they do not have view only permissions.

Before these were local workbooks and I could get the manager side to use a macro to update the employee workbook. Excel online does not allow macros.

Thank you in advance for any and all help.

Answer 1

Hi @Brad Tostenson
Per my research, there is no ootb method to update the link.

As a workaround, you could create a new list from excel of manager. In this case, as the excel for manager include the information of excel for employee, you format a table then create a list from that. For example, I have an excel:

Then I create a list from it:

OK, the preparation have been done, then we could use power automate to update the list according to the excel, the flow is as following:

Then if the excel have been updated, you could use this flow to update the list "employee" which just need to grant the read permission for the employees.

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