People often come to PickaForm to transform a simple Excel spreadsheet into a fully collaborative application. And that’s great because you can really do this in a few clicks.

But what people don’t notice or don’t understand immediately is that it’s just a starting point.

Yes! From there, you can do a lot more things with your data.

After the import, each Excel “row” becomes an independant “record” in a real database, which means you can properly work at the record level.

PickaForm offers a bunch of nice features to boost the data that came from your Excel spreadsheet:

• secure a record independantly, defining who can read it and modify it
• link records together, for example a Contract record linked to a Customer record
• attach a workflow to have the record validated by different collaborators through a predefined process (and PickaForm has a very easy workflow builder, out-of-the-box)
• merge data of the record into a PDF document, based on a chosen template (you create your own templates with Microsoft Word)
• attach files to the record
• link Google Drive files to the record
• add comments and start a discussion with your collaborators
• send an email containing the files attached to the record
• send an email containing a link to the record
• create a calendar event linked to the record
• create a new version of the record (snapshot of both the data and the attached files if there are some)
• transform a record of type A into a record of type B (with automatic fields migration)

On top of these record-level features, you have a number of other benefits to transform your Excel spreadsheets into PickaForm applications:

• you have a workspace with all your different applications in the same place
• you can share this workspace with your collaborators
• you can secure each application independantly
• you define various lists of data (= views = perspectives = filters) so that the user can browse the application content very easily, and each user only sees what he has to.
• you benefit from a powerfull full-text search engine that looks into the records and also into the attached files.

As you can see, transforming your Excel spreadsheet into a PickaForm application is not only a way to share your data online: it’s also the best way to empower it.

In a future release, we will add a video introducing all these features right after an Excel import, so that newcomers can easily understand all the new possibilities offered with their data in PickaForm.

1 row of Excel data transformed into an independant database record with its own features