Aug 28th, 2010, 8:48 AM
Hi Conrad,
Wow, this is a tough problem, actually! There are a lot of hoops you'd need to jump through to get it doing.
So first off, I'll be up-front: I know nothing about scripts to dynamically import content into your Excel spreadsheet. I'm sure there are solutions out there (maybe even built into Excel) but I don't know anything about them. If I were faced with your problem I'd start off by investigating that. That would give you an idea of what format the information needs to be in in order to be imported.
Once you have that figured out, I'm betting that Form Tools will be able to help out. You can custom-build formats so that the form submission data is created in any format you like (e.g. an XML format that may makes Excel happy).
The next problem is downloading all the FT content - including images - to your local computer / server. Form Tools handles file uploads to your server just fine, but that's only half the battle: it needs to be downloaded as well. For this step, you'll really need to look into a custom script. Again, if I needed to do this, I'd either:
(a) set up a local FTP server, then write a cron job on your website to run a (custom) script to gather the data and files and FTP them to you on a schedule.
or
(b) write a cron on your site to gather and zip-up the data and files, then write another cron / scheduled task on your computer to grab that file from your website.
Either way, it's not that simple - you'll definitely need a programmer handy.
Sorry - not terribly much help, I'm afraid. But good luck with it!
- Ben
Wow, this is a tough problem, actually! There are a lot of hoops you'd need to jump through to get it doing.
So first off, I'll be up-front: I know nothing about scripts to dynamically import content into your Excel spreadsheet. I'm sure there are solutions out there (maybe even built into Excel) but I don't know anything about them. If I were faced with your problem I'd start off by investigating that. That would give you an idea of what format the information needs to be in in order to be imported.
Once you have that figured out, I'm betting that Form Tools will be able to help out. You can custom-build formats so that the form submission data is created in any format you like (e.g. an XML format that may makes Excel happy).
The next problem is downloading all the FT content - including images - to your local computer / server. Form Tools handles file uploads to your server just fine, but that's only half the battle: it needs to be downloaded as well. For this step, you'll really need to look into a custom script. Again, if I needed to do this, I'd either:
(a) set up a local FTP server, then write a cron job on your website to run a (custom) script to gather the data and files and FTP them to you on a schedule.
or
(b) write a cron on your site to gather and zip-up the data and files, then write another cron / scheduled task on your computer to grab that file from your website.
Either way, it's not that simple - you'll definitely need a programmer handy.
Sorry - not terribly much help, I'm afraid. But good luck with it!
- Ben