Live Excel Sync

Keep an Excel workbook in step with your GlyphFex project so your existing pivots, charts, and formulas keep working as the underlying data refreshes.

What Live Excel Sync does

If someone in your office lives in Excel and isn’t giving it up, Live Excel Sync is the bridge. GlyphFex stays the source of truth; your bookkeeper’s workbook stays the way she does reports. You don’t make her switch tools.

The problem with regular CSV export is that every refresh wipes your pivots and charts — the office has to rebuild them. Live Excel Sync solves this with a clear-and-rewrite strategy on a multi-sheet .xlsx file. GlyphFex writes data to its own sheets; pivots, charts, and formulas live on different sheets that reference the data sheets. When the data refreshes, the references update and the dashboards keep working.

Live Excel multi-sheet workbook An Excel workbook with auto-generated “Summary”, “Active Jobs”, “All Entries”, “Time Entries”, and “Customer Summary” data sheets and a user-built “Dashboard” sheet with pivots and charts referencing them.

How to enable Live Excel

Connect to Excel. From the File menu → Connect to Excel (Live)… Pick a destination file path. Either point to an existing .xlsx file or create a new one. GlyphFex writes 5 starter sheets the first time: Summary, Active Jobs, All Entries, Time Entries, and Customer Summary.
Refresh. Use File menu → Refresh Live Excel any time the data changes. GlyphFex clears each of its own sheets and rewrites them; everything else in the workbook is preserved. The first refresh is fast; subsequent refreshes are also fast because GlyphFex only writes its own sheets, not the whole file.
Build your dashboards in Excel. Create a new sheet (e.g., Dashboard) and use pivots, charts, or formulas that reference cells on the GlyphFex sheets. Save the workbook.
Refresh whenever you need fresh numbers. File → Refresh Live Excel. The data sheets update; the dashboard sheet recalculates automatically.

What survives a refresh

The clear-and-rewrite strategy only touches the 5 GlyphFex-owned data sheets. Anything you add elsewhere in the workbook is preserved:

Custom sheets — Dashboards, pivots, charts, and any other sheets you create
Formulas referencing data sheets — =SUMIFS('All Entries'!I:I, 'All Entries'!B:B, "Welding") keeps working (single-quote a sheet name with a space in it)
Pivot tables built on data sheets — Refresh the pivot inside Excel (or set it to refresh on open) and it picks up the new rows
Charts — Chart series ranges update automatically as data sheets grow or shrink
Cell formatting on data sheets — column widths, header colors, and frozen panes are restored on refresh; cell-level formatting on data rows is not preserved (data rows are rewritten)

What is NOT preserved on the GlyphFex sheets Anything you type into rows on Summary, Active Jobs, All Entries, Time Entries, or Customer Summary gets wiped on refresh — that’s the price of keeping them in step with the source. Put your additions on a different sheet that references the data sheet via formula.

The five data sheets

Sheet	One row per	Typical use
Summary	One snapshot row (current period)	Top-of-workbook KPIs: total active jobs, total billable hours, total value in flight
Active Jobs	Job currently in a non-completed stage	The working list — what the office hands the shop floor every morning
All Entries	Job in the project (capped at the most recent 5,000 to keep workbook size sane)	Customer history, win-rate analysis, year-over-year trends
Time Entries	Clock in/out record from the Workstation Terminal	Labor cost rollup, by-worker / by-stage hours, billable totals
Customer Summary	Unique customer across all entries	Customer rollup — total jobs, total value, last activity per customer

Column headers on the data sheets are human-readable title case with spaces and shop abbreviations so the office can read them at a glance — for example, the All Entries sheet has columns Ref #, Status, Customer, Description, Created, Updated, Due Date, Quantity, Est Hours, Actual Hours, Priority, PO #, Ref Value, Notes. Reference these names literally in your formulas. Note: this is intentionally different from the Data Feed, which uses snake_case keys (customer_name, due_date) because Power BI and other programmatic readers prefer that.

The recommended workflow

Set up your data sheets once by clicking Refresh on a fresh workbook.
Spend an hour building the office’s dashboards on a new Dashboard sheet using pivots, slicers, and charts.
Save the workbook to a shared network folder (e.g., \\fileserver\Reports\GlyphFex.xlsx).
Whoever runs end-of-day reports opens the workbook and clicks Refresh in GlyphFex when they want fresh numbers.
If you need a fully scheduled, hands-off version of this, use the Data Feed instead — it drops CSV/JSON files on a folder every N minutes and Power Query / Power BI can pull from there with no manual click required.

When to use Live Excel vs. the alternatives

Tool	Best for	Trade-off
Live Excel Sync	You want Excel as your single source for office reporting and you’re willing to click Refresh manually	Manual refresh; one workbook at a time
Data Feed	You want unattended, scheduled drops into Power BI, an ERP, or an accountant’s folder	Stable file paths only — not a one-click pivot setup
One-shot CSV / Excel export	You need to email a snapshot for a single meeting or to a tax accountant	Snapshot only — no live refresh

Gotchas

The file is locked

If you have the workbook open in Excel while GlyphFex tries to refresh, the write fails and GlyphFex shows a toast telling you the file is in use. Close Excel (or just close the workbook) and click Refresh again.

I lost data on a data sheet

If you typed into a row on Summary, Active Jobs, All Entries, Time Entries, or Customer Summary and then clicked Refresh, the typed data is gone. The data sheets are derived from GlyphFex — do your hand-edits on a separate sheet, or do them inside GlyphFex itself so they survive the refresh.

My pivot table didn’t update

Excel pivot tables don’t auto-refresh by default. Right-click the pivot and pick Refresh, or set Pivot Options → Data → Refresh data when opening the file. Charts based on the same source will then update automatically.

I want a different set of columns

The column set is fixed by GlyphFex to keep the schema stable for your formulas. If you need a custom column, derive it on your Dashboard sheet using a formula that references the data sheet. The same stability promise applies to columns as to the Data Feed v1 schema — we won’t remove or rename existing columns; new columns appear at the right.