At $work, there are a lot of spreadsheets floating around that have defined Access queries as data sources. Those queries in turn use tables that are linked to a PostgreSQL database. When the user of the spreadsheet refreshes the spreadsheet, Excel re-runs the Access query and automatically pulls it in.

I don't like this architecture for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the people who wrote those Access queries often didn't know what they were doing, and sometimes break each other's spreadsheets by changing the queries. However they really like the ease of setting up spreadsheets that automatically refresh their data, and I completely see their point.

I'd like to be able to develop reports, preferably in Perl and preferably in Linux, that can similarly be linked into Excel spreadsheets and automatically refreshed (causing my reports to be re-run). If this involves adding a plugin to Excel, that's fine. If I need to do something like provide a URL that serves XML, that's fine as well.

Has anyone actually done anything like this, and if so can you point me at the appropriate alphabet soup of technologies (preferably as simple a stack as possible) that I need to make it work?

In reply to Excel automatically pulling data from Perl? by tilly

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