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Restricted edit Permissions within a certain time window

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Posted on by BenCan

Hi there,

I'm planning out a solution that would potentially help my company save a lot of wasted effort. There are a few things I want to understand before I dive into prototyping though. The process I'm trying to streamline involves a lot of Excel templates being populated and sent by email to a shared mailbox, someone then physically combines these all together into a master register. The register (approx 15 columns but thousands of rows) is then used in a weekly session to give a snapshot of planned tasks at T-12(weeks), T-8(weeks), T-4(weeks) & T-1(week) . The idea would be to replicate the Excel Template in PowerApps with a Panner and Manager role. The issue is, T-4weeks is the cut off for creating new entries or making amendments to existing entries without triggering the Late Submission process. My two main questions at this point are:-

- Can PowerApps provide the T-4 cut off functionality?

- Is creating a PowerApp a good solution for handling potentially thousands of requests per year?

Hopefully the explanation above articulates what I'm wanting to do and appreciate any feedback in advance.

Kind Regards

Ben

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Building Power Apps

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Scott_Parker 1,090 on at

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Power Apps can do what you're thinking, absolutely. As far as the 4-week cutoff, that depends on your data source supporting row-level permissions. If you're using a SharePoint list to hold the rows, you could use a Power Automate flow that runs on a recurring basis that would change the permissions of the items. If you were going to use an Excel file as the data source, then anyone using the app will need edit permissions on the file. At that point, there is nothing restricting people from going directly to the Excel file and making any changes they like.

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BenCan 4 on at

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Thanks for the swift reply. I had originally thought about using the excel sheet as the data source, this was mainly down the trying to keep it as simple as possible. I had also briefly read that a SharePoint list shouldn't be used for a large number of rows, if it would be easier to control access I might have to reconsider though.

Having done some further reading it's apparent I probably should have also mentioned in the original post that the people currently submitting the template are is combination, some within the same MS Tenant but there are some external to it as well, therefore the app would need to be accessible to all these people 🤔

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Scott_Parker 1,090 on at

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Ah, the external users part does complicate it. You will need to check what your company is doing regarding licensing and guest users.

As a "quick fix" have you considered using Power Query to compile the excel files? Maybe something like Power Automate flow that triggers when the email is received and saves the excel file attachment to either OneDrive or SharePoint. Then pull the data into Excel using Power Query.

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BenCan 4 on at

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I will keep doing some reading and see if this could work. The quick fix is similar to something I also thought about but the quality of the data being sent through is quite poor and some submissions are now using modified versions of the template. I think it would take quite a lot to get a robust PowerQuery element set-up.

Thankyou for your responses.

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