New to SharePoint 2013. Trying to create a user facing informational list

Question

I am new to SP 2013, sorry if this is ridiculous or not feasible.

I work with automated calling and text messaging for a large organization. By default, a department is set to auto call, but can request to be switched to only a text message (saves $$$). I maintain an excel sheet which lists all departments by area, and the status of their outreach,CALL or TEXT. Is there any way that I can set up a sharepoint site where the user inputs their location and department from a drop down menu, which data is sourced from an imported excel sheet, and have the status be a read only field that displays the lookup value (either CALL or TEXT)?

I appreciate any advice or tips. Thanks Stack community.

Answer 1

You cannot dynamically link SharePoint to Excel data like this. But you can move the data from the Excel workbook to a SharePoint list. Create a custom list with the same columns as in the Excel spreadsheet. You may even be able to import the original spreadsheet into SharePoint, but this may require some additional cleanup work.

Once the data lives in SharePoint, discard the Excel file.

In SharePoint you can now use different techniques to look up the data, for example a view connected to a filter web part. The user selects location and department and the view is filtered by these values and shows the outreach status.

Or you could use Excel Services. Upload the Excel file into a SharePoint library and create a web part page with an Excel Web Part. The user selects the parameters and Excel performs the lookup and presents the results.