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Control cell color in shared Excel, in real-time?

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Posted on by SimonI

Greetings experts!

Let me start off by saying I am a total beginner, and have watched a lot of tutorials and guides but without luck/understanding on how to solve this problem of mine.

I want to create a table in Excel which is on Sharepoint or Onedrive (both seem like the best option), and this table will already have all the information on it. But what I want to make is so that I can control the background color on specific cells through a Power App (which I believe is the easiest and most logical way for a non-programmer?). And on the app all i want to have is a tab for each station and 3 coloured buttons which represents the color I switch the background to on the 1 connected cell.

The problem: how do i connect buttons to change color on the specific cell and also show which color is displayed, without having to open the Excel itself?

The general idea is I want to have the excel open on one screen further away, and control the cells from different stations around the building.

Thanks in advance

Best regards,

Simon

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Building Power Apps

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Adrian_Celis 1,652 Moderator on at

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Hi @SimonI

What you are trying to achieve is possible, but unfortunately you have to do some programming for this. And the whole process is not that simple for a beginner. To do this, first you have to create a script (using Office Scripts) in your Excel file. Next, you have to have the buttons (the ones that will control the color of the cell) in the app run a Power Automate flow to run that script.

Simple things like changing the value or retrieving data from Excel are quite easy to do in PowerApps, but to change cell colors, fonts, add /delete columns, rows, etc. will require a script.

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SimonI 5 on at

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I see, that´s a **bleep** shame ;(
I can´t set some rules within the Excel cell that for a certain value the background will be green/yellow/red, and then in Power Apps just change the value for the cell when the button is pressed?
Seems like I might have to surrender on fixing it myself then? 😕

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Adrian_Celis 1,652 Moderator on at

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Hi @SimonI

Come to think of it. You may set rules in your Excel file, but then the cell has to have a certain value, correct? The most basic things that PowerApps can do is make Excel as a data source, but then the Excel file has to have a table (as in the Excel data table). That's why you are limited to just editing data in a table from PowerApps (if there's no scripts involved).

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SimonI 5 on at

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Interesting, very good input and info. Thanks @Adrian_Celis
So by what I am hearing (wishing) I could have a table which I control the input from Power Apps (cause I could change value in the same cell over and over from PA yeah?) and in the same file I have free standing cells which have rules set to switch background and stuff depending on the value from said table? 🤔
Just thinking out loud as a total stranger to the programming/formatting of PA and Excel.

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Adrian_Celis 1,652 Moderator on at

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Hi @SimonI

Yes that's correct. I don't know how worthy it is but it's worth a try. 🙂

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