1 Get Started with the Oracle Visual Builder Add-in for Excel

The Oracle Visual Builder Add-in for Excel integrates Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with REST services to retrieve, analyze, and edit data from the REST service.

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After you install the add-in, a new ribbon tab (Oracle Visual Builder) appears in Microsoft Excel. This ribbon tab exposes buttons to configure a worksheet to integrate with a REST service to download data to a data table that you create in the worksheet. Once the data table has been created and populated with data, you can review, modify and create data before uploading changes to the REST service.

Once you complete the integration of the Excel worksheet with the REST service, you can optionally publish the Excel workbook that contains the integrated worksheet. Publication prepares the worksheet for the users who will use it for data entry tasks. Among other changes, the publication process removes buttons from the Oracle Visual Builder ribbon tab that are not required by users of the integrated worksheet.

The following image shows a published worksheet that is integrated with a REST service that manages employees. The user of this worksheet has updated one row and created a new row with employee data. These changes have been successfully uploaded to the REST service, as indicated by messages in the Status column. The user has also updated data in another row that has yet to be uploaded, as indicated by the Update message in the Change column.

The following image shows the Table layout, which is one of the two types of layout that the add-in can create in an Excel worksheet. The second type is the Form-over-Table layout which you can configure for REST services where a parent-child relationship exists between a parent business object and child business objects in the REST service. You can create one type of layout per worksheet in your Excel workbook. That is, each worksheet in the Excel workbook can include a layout.

Subsequent sections in this guide describe how you install, configure, publish and use an Excel worksheet that is integrated with a REST service. You can integrate Excel workbooks with REST services that provides a service description that supports the OpenAPI format. See REST Service Support.

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