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

The Oracle Visual Builder Add-in for Excel is an add-in for Microsoft Excel that lets you interact with data from REST web services. It integrates Excel spreadsheets with REST services to retrieve, analyze, and edit business data from the service. You download your data to an Excel spreadsheet, work with it, and upload your changes back to the service.

What is 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 business data from the service. You can download your data to an Excel spreadsheet, work with it, and upload your changes back to the service.

Key Concepts, Components, and Terms

Before you use Oracle Visual Builder Add-in for Excel, it helps to become familiar with these key concepts, components, and terms.

Term	Description
Integrated workbook	An Excel workbook configured to work with one or more business objects.
Business object	An entity such as employees. A business object includes a collection path, an item path, a set of fields, and other properties.
Business object catalog	A set of one or more business objects with a common host and base path.
Collection path	A service path (endpoint) that can be used to fetch multiple rows of data from the business object and/or to perform operations on the collection.
Item path	A service path (endpoint) that can be used to fetch, or operate on, a single row from the business object.

How to Begin with the Oracle Visual Builder Add-in for Excel

After you install the add-in, a new Oracle Visual Builder ribbon tab appears in Microsoft Excel. As a workbook developer, you use the options in this ribbon tab to configure a worksheet to integrate with a service and download data to a data table that you create in the worksheet. Once the data table is created and populated with data, you can review, modify, and create data, then upload your changes to the service.

The following image shows a published worksheet that is integrated with an REST service that manages employees:

Description of the illustration excel-docexample-pub.png

The user has updated one row and created a new row with employee data. These changes have been successfully uploaded to the 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 image also features the Table layout, which is one of two types of layouts that the add-in can create in an Excel worksheet. The second type is the Form-over-Table layout, which you can configure for services where a parent-child relationship exists between a parent business object and child business objects in the 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 integrated Excel worksheet. You can integrate Excel workbooks with services that provide a service description in the OpenAPI format. See REST Service Support.

For Excel specifications and limits, see Microsoft documentation.