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Consuming (parsing) EXCEL documents into BizTalk - Using Farpoint Spread

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When I attended the SOA and BP conference in OCT in Redmond, I stopped by the FarPoint https://www.fpoint.com/ booth to checkout their new EXCEL parsing adapter they had developed for BizTalk 2006. Essentially its a dissasembler component that consumes XLS documents and maps them to a predefined XML schema. It looked pretty good!

EXCEL parsing is actually a common topic of conversation here in Australia. Many companies have processes in place that require their trading partners or agencies to send EXCEL spreadsheets to them and that data is often re-keyed into enterprise systems. Whoa... talk about error prone. Anyway...that's why I stopped by at the farpoint booth as it captured my attention.

They have called this  FarPoint Spread for Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2006 https://www.fpoint.com/biztalk/default.aspx and you can download a trial version. I have not had the chance to use it yet, but I will plan to try it in the coming weeks.

Anyway, Tom Canter emailed me recently to highlight that farpoint have their first official case study https://www.fpoint.com/company/studies/CaseStudy-FpSpreadBizTalk-GCS.pdf - worth a read.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 14, 2006
    PingBack from http://blogs.fpoint.com/?p=71

  • Anonymous
    May 11, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 30, 2007
    FarPoint Technologies is proud to announced the release of the new version of our BizTalk Server 2006 Excel pipeline disassembler, Spread for BizTalk. This version of Spread for BizTalk has been tested with BizTalk® Server 2006 R2 and is fully compatible. Spread for BizTalk version 1.7 also adds two new features that have been requested by customers. Support has been added for Microsoft Office Excel 2007 XML format, also known as Office Open XML (OOXML). In addition, Spread for BizTalk now allows Microsoft Excel® workbooks with a variable number of sheets to validate against a single schema. This is useful for BizTalk® applications that receive Excel files with variable number of sheets of a common format. For more information on Spread or BizTalk - www.FarPointSpread.com/BizTalk

  • Anonymous
    June 10, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 02, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 02, 2009
    Sridhar - the site is here: it's been nearly three years since i posted this - so the product should be great now! http://www.farpointspread.com/biztalk/default.aspx Can i suggest you email their sales email address for more info (as you can download trial versions) and if you dont hear from them... let me know. email them at: fpsales@fpoint.com

  • Anonymous
    May 22, 2014
    Hi Chris, I am looking for this tool but seems like farpoint is not exist anymore. Do you know how can I get this farpoint spread for biztalk? Remzi remzikh@gmail.com

  • Anonymous
    May 22, 2014
    Hi Remzi, I published that post eight years ago and haven't been exposed to Far Point since then. I agree with your view, it appears as though they no longer exist, but I would suspect there are many new options on the market that could facilitate Excel parsing with BizTalk.

  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2015
    Hi Chris, My company, RSSBus, has had quite a few former FarPoint customers reach out to us lately. You can find our BizTalk Adapter for Excel here: We offer a 30-day free trial and would be happy to speak with you regarding your specific requirements. I can be reached at ryanl @ rssbus.com. -Ryan  

  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2015
    Forgot to include the link above. Here it is: www.rssbus.com/.../excel

  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2015
    Thanks Ryan. I haven't really been involved deeply in the BizTalk community for many years but will pass onto my colleagues. Thanks