Pushing or serving real-time data to an excel spreadsheet

I am running some test automation on a networked computer resource (remote). The remote computer running the test automation generates some output, which I can customize however I wish - probably a text or excel file.

I would like to create an excel spreadsheet which, from my local machine, monitors this output and provides real-time analytics. Later I would make the networked computer visible to more people, and they can use the same spreadsheet to monitor this output.

My problem is that this networked computer is located on the other side of the earth, and so using any kind of polling in excel VBA to PULL the data from the networked computer results in a very long wait with the pinwheel spinning, making the sheet clumsy and less useful. The same thing happens when I use excel's built in function for linking to "external resources"

Is there any way to PUSH data to the excel spreadsheet from the networked computer? Something that is easy to set up would be ideal, the latency does not have to be low, so long as there is no awkward "busy wait" while the sheet updates. If that is no开发者_运维知识库t possible, is there any way of using PULL from the excel sheet that avoids the same busy wait?

You can write a Real-Time Data server

There's a lot of resources on this , but here is a good start

http://www.add-in-express.com/add-in-net/excel-rtd-servers.php

Due to the long delays stopping the excel process I can think of 2 possibilities assuming you are sticking with excel

• Pull the data to a local data source (Access, SQLite, SQL Server) and then query that
• Run the update query asynchronously so its not having the wait to get the data

Personally I would go for option 1