I have a few thousand rows of history data that I want Excel to access. This data will be used in creating a summary report, sparklines, and a table data.
My question is how should I go about adding new rows to the datasource? Powershell is required to extract data from the source (Exchange Server)... but then how do I surface that extracted data to Excel2010?
Here are my ideas:
1) Powershell can run externally and save the data to the XLSX (as long as the spreadsheet is closed) using Open XML libraries
2) Use Excel vb macros to call COM via interop (C# object) to get the data from Powershell. The returned values go to the XLSX (Ugly)
3) ????
(Advanced, not sure if this idea will work with above mentioned features)
If I were to move these rows to an external sheet, or SQL table, then I'd rather use other ways of importing the data into excel. I dont' know if this will work with sparklines, or tables. Perhaps I could use OData since it appears to be the most lightweight and firewall friendly.