Automate and change an excel based data feed based on month

Hi,

We have a scene that shows events during a month that is powered via a simple excel spreadsheet.

Each month is based on a separate sheet with an event per line and the scene simply shows the information from that sheet. At the moment every month we have to edit the experience, manually hide the data feed / structure based on the month just ended and show the next. Then obviously we have to republish the experience and update the players running the experience. Bits a bit of a pain just to swap a month over… :roll_eyes:

I was wondering if there a way to automate the hide / show of the data feed based on the actual month via the PC’s clock running the player so the experience updates itself at the start of every month at midnight or thereabouts.

Any suggestions or help would be appreciated. Happy to share the experience if it helps.

Thanks

Hi Rod,

I can see (at least) 2 options to answer your question:

  • In your Excel file, instead of having 1 sheet per month (if I understood correctly), you’d have 1 single sheet with a column “month”. When launching your experience, you would use a filter on this column, based on the Clock month parameter, to display only the events of the current month.
  • Instead of using an Excel file, if your players are connected to the internet, you could use a CMS such as Airtable. You could then make the modification of the events when needed and the experience would automatically retrieve the events to be displayed each time you launch the Player or when you manually ask for a data refresh.

Please tell me what you think of these solutions.

Seb

Hi Seb, Thanks for the info, much appreciated. As we are used to working with the spreadsheet I like the idea of using a filter. I’ll have a read up on how the filter works and see if i can implement that.

Many Thanks
Rod

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