Excel to MysSQL

Good day
I have a prospective web client who needs a website db to display data that he changes constantly (weekly) on an excel spreadsheet. He's going to be updating this data "on the fly" while visiting from business to business, so an internet connection is not the most reliable; he will have an ipad with excel doc that he directly types into. He does save it to skydrive.

His idea is that the website db "grabs" the data constantly from the excel doc stored on skydrive. I told him that most likely was either a.) not possible, or b.) not the simplest solution. I am guessing that some sort of "import" tool would work better.

What would the simplest way be to solve this issue? Is there a simple script that allows for importing excel into Mysql db? Thank you!

The most straight forward solution for your client would be to have a script that runs on a continuous basis, like every 4 hours, and have it load the Excel file from Skydrive and import it into the database. Having your client manually run an import script is possible too, but sounds like a lot more work on their part.

Unless the Excel document is of an extremely simple format (like, CSV-format-simple) I doubt you're going to find a pre-made import script that will be capable of handling it.

Excel has some built-in features for synchronizing directly with an external database, but I've never played around with that feature before and don't know whether it would do what you need; it might only support MSSQL.

Allow me to agree with you one more time, E-Oreo.

Allow me also to recommend, again, Navicat Lite as a scheduled task. It worked for me and is still running on my server. It's a little bit invasive if it fails, but if not, it goes straight.

Regards!