Digitalising Financial Markets with Data-as-a-Service

How ipushpull cloud-enables firms to seamlessly share live, streaming, and on-demand data with Data-as-a-Service.

There have been many unpredicted outcomes from the current COVID-19 pandemic, but one of the more interesting ones has been the rapid acceleration of digitalisation. How rapid? Well, earlier this year, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella stated that they’d seen two years’ worth of digital transformation occur within the space of two months, something that was inconceivable at the start of the year. While IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna said “history will look back on this as the moment when the digital transformation of business and society suddenly accelerated”.

Like many other industries, the financial markets sector, with so many staff confined to working from home in 2020, has suffered severe disruption to existing workflows, forcing firms to readjust their working practices.

But with every challenge comes opportunity, and the savvier firms are looking not only at how to get through the current situation, but how they can transform their business for the better over the longer term by utilising Cloud – and specifically Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) – as an enabling technology.

What is DaaS & what can it offer?

Data-as-a-Service provides the ability to seamlessly connect your data to the right person, at the right time, in the right application. This means that you can share your data – which could be sitting in a database, in a platform, or even in a spreadsheet – with your clients, your counterparties, or your colleagues, directly into applications they’re already using. Excel spreadsheets, chat platforms, chatbots, even internal platforms via an API, for example.

ipushpull’s approach to DaaS is to integrate into both legacy and cloud-based technologies, enabling firms to access and share live, streaming, and on-demand data across the entire trade lifecycle, from the front office through to the middle and back office.

To offer a few examples, live data might be an investment bank distributing live ‘high touch’ bond axes to the buyside’s spreadsheets, OMS or chat platform. Streaming data could be where a market-maker is constantly updating quotes from an internal pricing engine, or a broker client workflow of publishing real-time prices to clients in a ‘call around market’. And on-demand means that end users can pull the most up-to-date data from any data source. Ops users may be pulling down the latest list of ISINs to match to RIC codes for example, or risk managers might need to see live P&Ls in Symphony or Slack.

All of this needs to come with the requisite enterprise security, control, and audit necessary for financial markets.

Embracing the Cloud

Historically, data sharing in capital markets has been problematic. Either it’s been done manually, through emails, file sharing, and copying/pasting data – which is then very hard to streamline, automate, and audit – or firms have had to use expensive developers to connect data together, with none of it being ‘out of the box.’

ipushpull bundles all the data and tasks that were spread across spreadsheets, email and file shares into a new structured flow into any connected application. Utilising the Cloud as an enabling technology means you can share data inter as well as intra company. You can share data to trigger workflows with external clients, customers, and teams, and do it in any application via plug and play. And using the Cloud means it’s incredibly scalable, it’s significantly cheaper than trying to build it yourself, and it has a fast time to market.

The Cloud also offers several commercial benefits for both the suppliers of data and the end-users. From the end-user perspective, only paying for what you need allows you to match and scale your operational costs more closely with your trading activity, for example.

Beneficial use cases

Where our customers already have the data and the platform, but may lack the distribution into end-user applications, they have successfully used ipushpull either for the first or the last mile of connectivity.

The first mile is where data may be unstructured or sitting in an application or system that generally does not have any external connectivity. By connecting into ipushpull, data can be securely pushed into the Cloud and then made available elsewhere.

The last mile is about getting data into the applications or tools that your clients or your teams already use, so nothing new needs to be installed. That data can be coming directly into spreadsheets, into chat, or collaborative apps such as Symphony or Slack, or straight into your internal blotters or platforms that you might be using for that last mile of distribution.

Importantly, nothing is on-premise. Everything happens via the Cloud. Rather than engage costly development teams, or rely on manual processes where someone has to copy and paste from one application to another and send it to a counterparty who is doing something similar – a process that involves lots of manual tasks, emails, spreadsheets, copy/pasting and the like – by moving to this new way of data sharing, it unlocks both technical efficiency and automation, which means your staff can spend their time on higher-value activities or things that only humans can do such as being creative, complex decision making or speaking to clients.

A growing number of firms, including panelists from our recent webinar, such as NatWest Markets and Euromoney TRADEDATA, are now utilising different flavours of the examples given above. All of them are using ipushpull to accelerate digital initiatives to widen digital distribution channels and provide better experience for their clients and workflow efficiency and automation for end-users.

Conclusion

The digitalisation of these types of use cases will become more commonplace as people question why they are still using manual processes or one-off development projects to share data. As Data-as-a-Service becomes more prominent and firms look for technical efficiency and automation, we’ll see this new way of sharing data becoming the norm.

We see it already in the digitisation and electronification of OTC markets, where manual processes make way for standardised delivery of prices and workflow, but why stop there? Live data sharing can be ubiquitous internally across the firm, and externally to clients and counterparts – all of this being accelerated by the Cloud and by integrations into financial networks like Symphony, Refinitiv, Bloomberg, Broadridge, DTCC, Markit, etc.

In the post-COVID landscape, there is no new norm anymore. There is only a future state. As working practices change, workflow needs to be more efficient, and data needs to be easy to access, secure and access-controlled.

As we move towards live data-driven workflows, people need to be able to seamlessly connect to data in any application in real-time, at the right time, at the right place, and from any location.

We’re seeing Data-as-a-Service being adopted across sales and trading, between sell-side and buy-side, and across technology vendors. All of them are providing a better and more efficient experience for their clients.

It’s time to move away from manual processes, emails, spreadsheets, and copy/paste and away from embarking on expensive development projects to connect data from one app to another. Instead, look to incorporate Data-as-a-Service into your digital transformation projects or as a new digital distribution channel.

On-demand Webinar & Report: Digitisation of Pre-trade Client Workflows

Learn how J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Insight Investment and TP-ICAP are approaching the digitisation of pre-trade client workflows.

Understand how market infrastructure providers like CurveGlobal, Symphony and ipushpull are facilitating this by improving price discovery and building liquidity through standardisation, automation and live data.

REGISTER HERE

November 9, 2017November 9, 2017

Share spreadsheets into Slack – app takes data interoperability to the next level

In a recent blog we highlighted that if chat and collaboration platforms are looking to replace email then ipushpull is positioned to replace file attachments and file sharing.

In the past few years, driven by version control frustrations, email fatigue, security concerns and the desire for faster, more interactive communication, the sharing of information via email is increasingly being overshadowed by a growing range of collaboration tools.

This space is occupied by a combination of familiar tech heavyweights together with specialist collaboration app providers where Microsoft Teams and Workplace by Facebook compete with the likes of Slack, Symphony and Atlassian’s Stride.

The development of this new set of messaging and collaboration applications offers new channels for ipushpull‘s real-time data interoperability for end users in applications they already use. ipushpull is one of the first providers to really push to the limit the capabilities of these new collaboration tools, making it easy to share spreadsheets into Slack and Symphony along with other data.

In recent years, Slack has become one of the most popular and established applications in the chat space and has seen incredible growth with 6 million active daily users. It offers cross-team channels, private groups and 1-to-1 direct messages for messaging as well as file sharing.

However, even though Slack allows spreadsheets to be uploaded on the go, there is still no way to view them in the app itself. For sharing data from Excel spreadsheets, this can be a big drawback introducing the common problems of version control and collaboration difficulties associated with files. While users of Google Sheets still have to jump out of Slack (and thus context switch) to see their data, leaving ipushpull as the only app on the market that allows users to share spreadsheets into Slack.

How to share spreadsheets into Slack with ipushpull

Until now there has been no way to view selected ranges of data from spreadsheets within the Slack chat platform. ipushpull‘s Slack app offers just this – the ability to pull a selected range of data from a live spreadsheet directly into a Slack channel whether that’s a snapshot, live data or streaming data, in a secure encrypted form, so everyone on the channel can view and collaborate on the very latest information.

The ipushpull Slack app can support a wide range of use cases where customers have a need to share data in a secure way. Static, live or streaming data may be shared within the channel manually or via simple ipushpull Slack bots. Let’s explore a couple of use cases to explain how this functionality can be used.

Snapshot, or static, data

Snapshot data maybe shared manually or automatically when certain user-defined criteria are met. For example, a manager of a chain of retail stores may share sales data with management or staff by copying and pasting data into a chat channel, instead they can improve scalability and efficiency of their service by using a bot (also provided by ipushpull of course) to share the current state of sales or automatically alert management when a sales target is hit. All from a spreadsheet connected to Slack via ipushpull.

Live data

Live data enables someone in a team, working in a collaborative way, to make updates to data in their Excel spreadsheet, or local database, for example, and have that automatically – in real time – update in the ‘team’ Slack channel. For example, a multi-national enterprise, with a bid team working in diverse locations, can use the chat and ipushpull to collaborate on a financial model in a spreadsheet with changes reflected in real time within the Slack channel. The ‘no files’ model combined with the use of live data ensures the model is maintained in a single version and is always up to date.

Share data in Slack

Streaming data

Streaming data allows a real-time ‘ticking’ feed of data to be viewed in Slack. For example, whether monitoring the US stock market or live sporting results from one of ipushpull‘s streaming ‘public’ pages, or providing access to ‘in-house’ private streaming data in manufacturing or health sectors, ipushpull delivers the ability to share true real-time updates in fast changing environments where access to up-to-the-second information makes all the difference.

These use cases demonstrate just some of the ways ipushpull’s chat integrations can be used to enhance and improve workflow and communication within organisations. And with the recent launch of shared channels within Slack, which support intra-company collaboration, there will be many more to come.

So chat is great – but it takes more than just chat to make real improvements in business efficiency. That’s why ipushpull is focussed on taking chat to the next level.

Co-author: John Eccleston

January 6, 2017January 6, 2017

Top 5 workflow tools – supercharge your Excel and spreadsheets

Microsoft Excel‘s entrenched position as the most popular business tool owes a great deal to its breadth of functionality and flexibility. Over the years Excel users, from small businesses to financial professionals, have found that they’ve been able to turn its power to solve a huge range of challenges. However, many people are also using Excel for purposes that it isn’t suited for. I’d hazard a guess that every business has at least one critical spreadsheet that has spiraled out of control over time to the point where no one fully understands how it works, making it difficult to collaborate on. So we’ve come up with the top 5 workflow tools for Excel to help you overcome this problem.

Many fully-featured spreadsheet competitors to Excel have been launched with varying degrees of success, including Google Sheets and Zoho Sheet. However, for this article we’ve compiled products that solve self-contained problems – the kind of challenges that people have used Excel for, even though that’s not what it was designed to do.

Smartsheet – the project management tool

Even the smallest business needs a tool for managing employees’ time and tracking the progress of projects. For many years Microsoft Project has set the gold standard for this purpose, but it’s expensive and far too complex. Consequently, many businesses have gone back to using Excel for scheduling and time-tracking, which has given way to version control problems arising from spreadsheets being shared between multiple users.

Enter Smartsheet – a web-based project management tool with a spreadsheet-inspired interface. It’s taken the best features of Excel and Microsoft Project, added new features like notifications and real-time reporting and presented them in a powerful but simple-to-use online package. It has no version control problems that Excel files have and it automates many of the manual workarounds. It does this without the steep learning curve of Microsoft Project, that’s why it’s in our top 5 workflow tools. Simple enough for small businesses and powerful enough for large enterprises, it counts Netflix, Bayer and Accenture among its customers.

AbleBits Suite – the timesaving tool for Excel

If you’ve recently had to merge large tables in Excel or remove duplicates then this painstaking, fiddly process is fresh in your mind. It can take up a large chunk of your time, time you could have spent doing something a lot more productive than squinting at cells one by one. Ablebits delights everyone who completes these tasks day to day with their suite of Excel add-ons, taking away the manual chores that plague Excel. To name a few of the tools, Merge Tables Wizard does exactly what it says on the tin. If you think that you could merge tables even without this tool, then you should try working with bigger tables. Advanced Find and Replace Tool gives a lot more flexibility and allows to search inside notes, formulas and even all the sheets in your workbook. If you need to Remove Duplicates and Trim Spaces or just Fill Empty Cells, they’ve got the tool for you. All in they have 10 add-ons that incorporate a variety of useful task automations.

iPushPull – share and manage Excel data tool

Most businesses have critical data with functions to analyse it held in multiple Excel files. If they want to share this data across their businesses or with clients and customers they have to send entire files as email attachments or manually upload them using services like Dropbox. This inevitably leads to version control and security problems. It’s rare that these sheets get redeveloped as standalone applications – business requirements keep changing and there’s limited budget or desire to do so.

The iPushPull cloud service lets you share data ranges directly from desktop Excel and access them in other spreadsheets, on the web, on mobile and in other applications like Slack and Symphony. As your spreadsheet data changes, it automatically updates everywhere else. It’s the perfect tool for aggregating sales and finance data from multiple sites across organisations. With this live collaboration tool you can distribute information to customers or clients without leaving Excel, with built-in permissions and auditing to control who views or modifies the data.

Workday Worksheets – forecasting and planning for enterprises tool

This new addition to the host of Workday process management and planning tools, creates a new way to reconcile the forecasting and budgeting process for financial services. The original app is a collaborative tool for organisations to share live data and manage spreadsheets, and even has a chat interface. It gives enterprises a more adequate solution to working with spreadsheets than Excel. The Worksheets application looks great as a standalone tool, but you have to migrate to the Workday platform. A subscription to which is quite pricey, therefore making it more viable for large companies such as enterprises. The app isn’t directly integrated with Excel but spreadsheets can be uploaded to Worksheets.

OpenasApp – turn your sheets into mobile apps tool

Anyone who’s tried to open a full-sized spreadsheet on a mobile device will know that the user experience is not great. Finding the data you’re looking for is time-consuming, involves lots of swiping, pinching and zooming. Trying to manipulate the data or perform calculations is even more difficult. The new offering from OpenasApp lets you transform your spreadsheet data into an interactive mobile app. You select tables of data from your spreadsheet and use OpenasApp’s wizard to create your app. It attempts to work out what kind of data you have selected, and automatically generates graphs and charts using its built-in BI functionality. It even lets you integrate simple calculations into your new web app (unfortunately it doesn’t support macros yet). It’s a new product so it’s yet to be seen how popular it will prove, but we’ve put it in our top 5 workflow tools because its ability to create web apps on-demand using your existing business data is very attractive.

As a result of its functionality and flexibility, Excel has outgrown its original purpose. So there’s an increasing range of products and tools to help customers make their spreadsheets better such as the top 5 workflow tools we’ve described above. If you have a favourite tool that’s improved or replaced your spreadsheets, please tell us! And if you’d like a free trial of iPushPull, please sign up here today.

December 22, 2016February 23, 2017

Tech trends 2017: Convergence – Not the movie

Convergence. Sounds like the title of a dodgy b-movie, doesn’t it? And it is. In fact, there are several. But I’m not concerned with badly-scripted, straight-to-streaming films today. Convergence is one of the hottest subjects in tech press at the moment, particularly in the area of cloud services and productivity tools. For tech trends 2017: convergence is likely to remain there and here’s why.

Some are euphemistically calling it a bundling event, which sounds like a Black Friday sale at Walmart, but it amounts to the same thing: implement or acquire exactly the same features as everyone else and force them into your core product. In other words, the tech equivalent of a huddle of hipsters hanging-out in the same Dalston dive and choosing to assert their individuality by growing exactly the same beard.

Dropbox announced their new suite of productivity tools, which amount to a loosely-related collection of features that have been cherry-picked from the likes of Evernote, Office 365, Quip and others.

Slack integrated voice calling into their product earlier this year, just in time for Microsoft to announce Teams, which is essentially Slack with voice and video calling (as noted by CEO Stewart Butterfield in a full-page ad in the New York Times). In a move that surprised nobody, Slack responded this week with the addition of video calling (sadly lacking the very useful screen-sharing facility in Teams). Incidentally, both of these products look a lot like Yammer, which is, of course, owned by Microsoft.

I don’t know about you, but I’m struggling to keep up. You might argue that this sort of product convergence is good for competition and consumer choice; I can see that argument too. The problem for end-users is, when every product claims to do everything for everyone, how do we choose the right one?

Tech trends 2017: Convergence or integration?

Convergence is just another way of saying the current trend in tech is to value convenience over function. If it continues, we will simply end up with a selection of cloud-based multi-tools and users will find themselves choosing between the digital equivalent of a tin-opener attachment or the tool for removing stones from horse’s hooves.

The trouble is, as anyone who has ever tried to fix the car with a Leatherman or put up a shelf using a Swiss Army Knife will know, these general-purpose tools will only get you so far. They are fine for simple tasks, but bigger projects require more specialised and sophisticated tools to get the job done well.

It’s a feeling that will be familiar to anyone who has ever tried to perform some serious financial analysis using an online spreadsheet (assuming you’ve solved the not-insignificant problem of accessing the data you need in the cloud), or do something as simple as generate a table of contents in the online version of Microsoft Word.

When it comes to technology, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery; integration is. At iPushPull, we are striving to bring together the tools you know, whether on desktop or mobile, with the accessibility of the cloud. We don’t believe convenience has to come at the cost of function, and we certainly don’t subscribe to the view that you need to give up the powerful, fully-featured applications you need in order to be productive.

The list of tools we are integrated with is expanding continuously, and now includes Slack, WordPress, Microsoft Teams, PDFs and of course Excel. You can chat in Slack with your team while viewing live updating data, host it on your WordPress website, or simply view live data on your mobile with our platform.

Start your 30 day free trial to see what iPushPull can do for you.

April 19, 2016April 19, 2016

Google Sheets and Excel Online vs iPushPull – Why choose iPushPull?

We’re often asked about the differences between iPushPull vs Google Sheets and Excel Online. The Google and Microsoft applications attempt to replicate desktop spreadsheets but offer vastly reduced functionality and integration. And they don’t tackle the data security and access control issues that face all users who share spreadsheets with their colleagues and clients. In this respect, web-hosted sheets are not much better than a spreadsheet saved on a shared drive.

We decided to think different. We wanted to let our customers retain all the features of their desktop applications but also give them the convenience of cloud access to their data. So we built iPushPull.

Google Sheets and Excel Online vs iPushPull: Share your data without compromising on functionality

iPushPull integrates directly with your desktop Microsoft Excel, so you retain all the features of the desktop application and can continue to use your local database links, live feeds and custom macros. iPushPull lets you share some or all of the data from your sheet with whoever you choose, wherever they are. And because you’re still using your full desktop application you can still see your data when you don’t have web access – for example, when you’re on the train.

Your latest LIVE data available on any device

Whether the data in your desktop Excel spreadsheet is entered manually, updated by a live feed or imported from a local ERP or CRM system, iPushPull lets you share it with other Excel users and view it on the web or mobile. iPushPull can be easily integrated into any website – we’ve even developed a highly-rated plugin for WordPress-powered sites.

Once you’ve started sharing data from your spreadsheets, iPushPull will be updated every time your data changes – there’s no need to save your sheet. Your colleagues and clients will see the data update live in their spreadsheets or on any mobile device. There’s no need to reopen the file or hit refresh.

Superior access control

When you share a Google or Excel spreadsheet with someone, they get access to all the data contained within it. iPushPull lets you control access at the sheet, range or even at the individual cell level. So you can choose to share just the critical information from your sheet with the individuals or groups of people who need to see it, with no chance of over-sharing.

Complete security – spreadsheet data encrypted from end-to-end

Google Sheets and Excel Online are basically files stored on a cloud service. As such, they’re vulnerable to the kind of security breaches which have, sadly, become a regular occurrence. iPushPull lets you encrypt your data before it leaves your device, so it’s totally secure until it reaches the intended recipient. We can’t read your data, or give anyone else access to it, even if we wanted to! And we have some exciting developments in the pipeline that will give you even greater control over where, when and by whom your data can be accessed.

Consolidate and summarise data from across your business and customer base

iPushPull lets you pull data from multiple remote spreadsheets and mobile devices into a single sheet, automatically. It’s easy to build summary reports using data from across your business, regardless of where the data was entered or the application used to enter it. You don’t need a developer to create your own user-focussed B2B or B2C applications scaling to 10s, 100s or even 1000s of users. This just isn’t possible with web-hosted sheets.

Share data across all the applications you use – even using SMS

The iPushPull Excel Add-In works with all versions of desktop Microsoft Excel from 2007 to 2016. You can also access your data with our desktop and mobile websites (and with our upcoming Google Sheets add-in and Android and iOS apps, too). And when you’re not connected to the internet, you can even push and pull your data using SMS. When you’re using Google Sheets or Office 365 you’re locked into a walled garden.

iPushPull gives you desktop functionality, cloud connectivity, mobile access and enterprise-grade permissioning, security and encryption.

October 9, 2015November 19, 2018

Embed live Excel spreadsheets in web pages using our WordPress Plugin

We’ve had a great response to the ipushpull WordPress plugin we released back in August! The plugin lets you display live Excel data in your webpages when you’re using desktop Excel. We weren’t entirely sure what people would do with it and it’s been fascinating to find out the kind of uses it’s being put to. Here’s what some of our customers have been doing:

Monetizing the results of data mining and number crunching (using Excel VBA)

Excel VBA lets you build powerful applications in desktop Excel but they just don’t work in Excel Online. ipushpull lets you retain the power and flexibility of your desktop sheets but also lets you see them updating live on the web. The following customer project is still under wraps so unfortunately we can’t be too specific. As soon as it’s been uncloaked we’ll publish full details!

One of our customers in the travel sector uses custom Excel VBA to pull live data from multiple public APIs into their spreadsheet. They then analyse this raw data with bespoke algorithms, and display the resulting information in an ipushpull-enabled sheet. Each time this sheet updates, our customer’s WordPress website updates too. This derived information is so valuable that they are able to charge their own customers for access to it. Building a standalone app to do all this would be expensive and inflexible – ipushpull makes it easy and it’s extremely good value, of course!

Displaying live data from business-critical systems on the web (ERP and CRM)

Many companies still depend on locally-hosted ERP and CRM systems and are reluctant to migrate to web-hosted alternatives because of the expense, disruption and security risk. These kinds of systems generally don’t have native web capabilities. So how can you access data from them when you’re out of the office? Step forward Excel and ipushpull…

Excel lets you import data from any local database directly into your spreadsheets using an ODBC link. One customer, a lighting manufacturer in Pennsylvania, uses this approach to pull purchase order information from their ERP system into Excel. ipushpull publishes this data to a dashboard which is displayed on a monitor in their workshop, so the team always knows when to expect materials. ipushpull makes it easy to link legacy systems to the web and, because you control the content and layout of what you publish, it’s simple to update when your requirements change.

Password Protected Pricelists

ipushpull pages can be public, so everyone can see them, or private, so they can only be viewed by the people you specify. Another customer, a supplier of motorcycle spares, wants to keep some of his price lists private for his favoured customers only. So he updates this list every day and publishes it to an ipushpull page which is encrypted using a password that he’s shared with those customers.

We’ve built some powerful features into ipushpull:

Use it to display live Excel data on your webpages
You don’t need to save the source spreadsheet to update the data
Your content updates automatically – the reader does not need to refresh the browser to get the latest update
You choose the range of cells that gets displayed
You control the update frequency – every few seconds, every hour, every day
Your data can be public or password protected

Now try it for yourself! Sign up for a free trial today!

August 7, 2015January 16, 2019

Display live data from Excel spreadsheets in your WordPress website or blog

ipushpull now lets you embed live, updating data from your desktop Excel spreadsheets in your WordPress website or blog! Whether you’ve a price list that you want to publish every morning, or finance data that changes every few seconds, we’ve made it incredibly easy to send this data directly from your desktop Excel spreadsheet to your site. You don’t need to save the Excel spreadsheet and upload it every time you make a change, and your website visitors don’t need to refresh the page to see updates. With ipushpull it’s automatic, in just a few easy steps.

Live Demo

The blog you’re reading is powered by WordPress, so it’s the ideal place for a demo. Here’s a simulated stock portfolio, updating every few seconds:

This portfolio is being updated by a desktop Excel spreadsheet running at ipushpull HQ down in the Silicon Basement. The data you’re looking at is updated every time the source sheet changes. The formatting and styles are being captured from the original Excel source, and this page also includes some links to other iPushPull pages, letting you drill down from the summary to the details. So you can build a hierarchy of live data pages as complex or simple as you like, using the tools that you already use, and publish them live in your website. There’s no development required. This is what we like to do at ipushpull – take the tools you love, like Excel and WordPress, and link them together to make difficult jobs simple.

Other Features

Make your data Public or keep it Private

The demonstration page displayed above is a public page, so anyone who visits your site will be able to see it. But you can also use ipushpull’s access control features to restrict access to your data, meaning that your site’s visitors will only be able to access the data by entering a password. Keep a price list private for priority customers, or publish individual pages for all your clients and embed them in your site with no development required on your side.

Display data from any application, not just Excel

If your data’s in Microsoft Excel, the ipushpull WordPress plugin now lets you get it onto your website. We’re also working on new integrations (watch this space for our Google Sheets add-in). But remember that ipushpull is an open platform and you can use our APIs to integrate it with any system or online service.

Not just WordPress

If you don’t use WordPress for your website you can still embed ipushpull pages in it. See this page in our Support Centre for details.

How to do it

The ipushpull WordPress plugin lets you embed pages in your site with a single line of code. For more details visit the ipushpull WordPress plugin page in the WordPress plugin directory. It includes full instructions about installing and using the plugin, but if you need further help please visit the ipushpull Support Centre or email support@ipushpull.com.

Start using ipushpull today by signing up for a free trial.

June 23, 2015October 15, 2015

Enrich your live iPushPull pages by adding links

Link your iPushPull pages to each other, to external websites, and to phone, email and SMS apps

Have you added links to your iPushPull pages yet? You can add links between iPushPull pages and to external websites, and links that launch your phone, SMS or email applications directly from your live data pages.

Adding links between your iPushPull pages lets you build rich, deep and LIVE websites, and our Microsoft Excel Add-in lets you add them quickly and easily. Links let you structure your data exactly the way you want to – with index pages and high level summary reports connected to detailed breakdowns, allowing your colleagues and clients to drill down to exactly the level of information they need. None of this compromises security – each user can still only access just those pages you’ve granted them permission to see.

One of our financial markets customers uses the iPushPull mobile app to keep their risk manager up-to-date with the latest market moves. The summary page displays constantly updating headline information about each of their traders’ positions, risk and P&L. Each row links to an individual page showing detailed activity data for the particular trader, so the manager can dive in whenever he needs more information. Another customer has built a set of pages linking the latest stock levels in their warehouse to delivery schedules. In both cases our customers are pulling live data from external systems (trading and ERP, respectively) into desktop Microsoft Excel, and pushing it to iPushPull directly from their spreadsheets. They’re using iPushPull as a live Content Management System. Try doing that with Google Sheets!

Drill down into trading history from portfolio screen

We’ve embedded a simulation of a live stock portfolio being generated by an iPushPull-enabled spreadsheet below. Click on the underlined links to see the trading history for each stock, and click Back to return to the portfolio page.

To view this in our web app on desktop or mobile click here. Please note that we’ve made these pages public for demo purposes – if this was your portfolio they would be protected by iPushPull’s award-winning security and encryption!

Launch your Email, Phone and SMS apps direct from your pages

With iPushPull links you’re not limited to creating connections between iPushPull pages. You can add links to external websites, and create links which launch email, phone and SMS apps with the email addresses and numbers you’ve specified when they’re tapped or clicked. Build a shared directory page for your team, or create live data pages for your clients and let them contact you directly from the page with no fiddling around switching apps or looking for numbers.

Here’s one we prepared earlier, quickly and easily, within Microsoft Excel using our Add-in. Click on any of the links to see what happens:

To view this in our web app click here. It’s best experienced on a mobile phone or similar device with phone and SMS capability. We don’t recommend you try calling any of the numbers!

For detailed instructions how to create links in your iPushPull pages, read our excellent support pages:

Why not sign up for a free trial and try it for yourself?

May 19, 2015May 20, 2015

Link Excel spreadsheets so no more email attachments

If you scroll down your email inbox I’ll bet you’ll see a fair few paper clips, highlighting those emails that arrived complete with their own attachment. Let’s take a look at a few, shall we, and see what’s attached? Ah – here’s an MS Excel spreadsheet with those sales forecasts you were waiting for. And here’s the updated pricelist you were expecting from your supplier. And timesheets from your sales people out on the road. And…

Let’s open one of these emails. Done? Right – download that attachment. Then try to work out where it’s been downloaded to. Found it? OK, fire up Excel, open the sheet and scan through it to find the particular range of cells you’re actually interested in and finally copy them into your master sheet. Job done?

If you’re lucky that might be the end of your work. But perhaps you have to generate a company-wide sales report from separate sheets submitted by all your branch offices, or maybe you have to process time sheets from all your remote workers. As companies spread and more staff work remotely, more and more spreadsheets will be dropping into your inbox. And the alternatives to sharing this way are not much better.

You could try a shared sheet on a cloud drive like Dropbox instead. But do you really want everyone working on the same sheet? Should your New York office be able to see London’s figures? Has everyone updated their bit yet? Who’s got the file open now? Which version are we working on again?

There is a better way.

Link Excel Spreadsheets with iPushPull

iPushPull lets you link Excel spreadsheets, whether they’re in the same office or on opposite sides of the world. So every remote office or worker can update their own sheets independently without blocking anyone or accessing anyone else’s data. The instant they make their changes they’re pushed to iPushPull. And the moment the changes are pushed to iPushPull every linked sheet will be updated automatically – there’s no need to save or refresh anything.

Here’s a head office report that consolidates key figures from every branch office in a single place. Each row of the report is linked to a remote sheet and updates whenever the remote sheet is changed:

The Time Updated and Who Updated fields show when each remote site updated their data and who did it, so it’s easy to see who deserves a pat on the back and who needs a gentle nudge (hurry up, Eddy!). Each office can only access its own data so only you can see this big picture. And because you can view your live iPushPull data securely on your mobile phone, you can check it on your way into the office. So you’re ahead of the game.

iPushPull works with all versions of Excel from 2007 onwards and it’s easy to integrate it with your existing spreadsheets. You don’t have to change your business processes – just make them much faster and simpler.

So if you’d like fewer paper clips in your inbox in future, why not try iPushPull free today?

iPushPull – link Excel spreadsheets