Certainly, If you have data, let's say its something simple like the names of your field crew, that needs to be included in multiple forms and has the potential to change from time to time.
- Put the names into an excel file that will be your master for all data used in multiple forms.
- CREATE A BORDER - It would be a good idea to allow for additional employee names, so if you currently have 20 people in the field select 30 rows and allow for additional columns for their phone numbers, addresses, etc, in case you decide to use that, or any other, type of employee data in some way down the road, and put a heavy border around those cells. This is just to create a boundary that you know not to place any non-related data in that area of the spreadsheet.
- So now maybe you have 5 columns and 30 rows protected in your XLS, go to your choices tab in your XLSForm and link those cells in the master XLS to the XLSForm. This part is a bit of a pain to me, because its clunky and I'm sure there's a better way. If you know how to do the links, just ignore the rest of this, unless you can tell me how to do it better.
- Go to the the top left cell of where you are going to start linking the master xls, in the choices tab
- Select that cell
- Type the = sign
- Select the cell in the master XLS that you want linked
- Make the XLSForm active again
- Hit a return and the data from the XLS should be linked and appear.
- Select the linked cell, select the little + and drag it down for a total of 30 cells to link all of the protected cells in the master XLS.
- Here's where it gets dumb, because you would think that at this point you could simply highlight the cell with the link in it and drag it down the column to create the rest of the links in that column. When I do this it just copies the A1 link to the other cells and I get a column full of links to A1. So I change them all to A2, A3, A4..... A30. This is still much faster than linking each cell.
- Then highlight those 30 cells and drag them 4 columns to the right.
- So now in the B column all of your links are A1-A30, change them to B1-B30
- Do the same for the remaining columns.
If there is a way to do this more efficiently, please let me know.
