13 Publish an Integrated Excel Workbook

Once you complete configuration of an Excel workbook, you can publish it for users to do data entry work. Publishing creates a copy of the workbook with the design tools hidden and worksheet protection turned on for each worksheet with a layout.

The recommended steps to take before you publish an Excel workbook are:

1. Complete configuration of the workbook.
2. Test the configuration thoroughly.
3. Use Excel’s Inspect Workbook feature to review and remove personal information from the workbook.
4. In the Oracle Visual Builder tab, click Clear for each layout in the workbook.
5. In the Advanced drop-down, click Clear List of Values Cache.
6. Save this source version of the workbook.

Note:

Publishing is optional. All the data editing features of an integrated workbook are available in both published and unpublished copies of the workbook.

Once you configure and test your workbook, make a backup copy of the unpublished (source) workbook in case you need to make further configuration changes at a later date post-publication. Consider adding a file name suffix of –src for the source workbook. Then, remove the suffix in the published copy. Excel will not allow you to use the same file name for both workbooks. You click the Clear button before you publish it. Clearing data works on the current layout; if your workbook has multiple layouts, you should ideally clear each layout.

Use Excel's Inspect Workbook feature to review and remove your personal information from the workbook before you distribute it. You access the Inspect Workbook feature from Excel's File menu. Deselect the check box next to the Hidden Worksheets entry in the Document Inspector where you choose the content to inspect and potentially remove. You must not remove hidden worksheets from the Excel workbook that you distribute. The Oracle Visual Builder Add-in uses hidden worksheets to integrate the Excel workbook with the REST service.

Once you are ready to distribute the workbook to users, click Publish. In the Publish Workbook window that appears, select Remove the service host from each service in the published workbook if you want users to enter the service host when they open the published workbook, and click OK.

Description of the illustration excel-ribbon-publish.png

Accept the default file name and directory location values for the published workbook or select alternative values in the subsequent window, then click Save. You can now distribute the published workbook to users.

When a user performs an action that requires access to the REST service in a published workbook where you removed the service host value, a Service Configuration window prompts the user to enter their service host value before the action can be executed. Actions that require access to the service include the Download Data and Upload Changes commands.

There are a number of differences with the source workbook:

• The design tools do not appear in the Oracle Visual Builder tab of the Excel ribbon (Designer, Delete Layout, and Publish buttons), as shown in the following image.
• Excel's sheet protection is on. This mode enables true read-only behavior for cells that should be read-only. It also prevents the user from performing various other Excel actions that might disrupt the integration with the service.
  Description of the illustration excel-ribbon-pub.png