First off all, working with Speckle has been a great experience and I love that I can work with my colleagues so easily while using different programs!
I do have a question though: How come there is no ‘auto-receive/auto-update’ option in the Speckle connector within Excel and would it be a good feature to have in the future? I would like to just select a stream (perhaps even a list within the filter, but that could be a feature for later) that imports the latest data I send to it without needing to filter manually.
Basically something like the Parameter updater. Why would we like to have something like this: We would like to have our database in Speckle, so that we can automatically use these values within our calculations and whenever the database gets updated, the data inside the excel sheet should be as well. We also want to use this database inside Grasshopper, that why we thought Speckle would be our best, easiest and user friendliest option.
Would love to hear about your opinions about this case!
Thanks for the nice words and suggestion, I think we considered adding auto-send (&receive) when we first implemented the Excel connector, but there was high risk it would be mis-used.
In Excel, it’s very easy to create functions that periodically automatically update values (such as now()). This could have heavy effects on our Server if somebody forgot it on with auto-send . Likewise, it’s easy to trigger a cell value update unintentionally.
Another point is that this type of communication is not very reliable, as it requires both sender and receiver to be online all the time, if the connection drops or the exchange fails, this could lead to your excel database being out of date…
If you could tell us a bit more about the workflow you have in mind we might be able to suggest a few more options
Thank you for the quick and clear response. It does make sense that the servers could be overloaded due to misusage. That’s a good point you have, it should indeed be up to date and usable offline as well.
To tell you more about our workflow:
We would like to create a simple LCA calculation, in which we have an Excel user to put in the: project & variant definition > For a variant, select material from a (updated) dropdown (Which is coming from a database) > Provide amount for selected materials | After the user has put in the data, the sheet will do its work > Do calculation with the provided data + Data from database > create output (results of calculations will probably be showed in graphs)
Gotcha, I’m thinking if something like a bit of python + https://streamlit.io/ might be a better way to do this rather than Excel?
Another option, which would require some more coding skills, could be Speckle Automate, where you hardcode your calculations but can feed different types of inputs. Automate will run automatically every time you push data to Speckle (docs).
. Likewise, it’s easy to trigger a cell value update unintentionally.