InfoPath Dev

Good afternoon to you all,

A colleague and I have been working on extracting to Excel all the data in a sharepoint submitted form that contains a repeating section embedded within another repeating section.  Eventually we gave up and eliminated the main repeating section and decided upon having a form per customer entry that has only one repeating section.  This is a fix but extremely non user friendly and inefficient. Could anyone please help? I've found some posts and details on what I could possibly do but they've all led me to non working solutions as well as the fact that I am very inexperienced.

Hi Bonz2012 and welcome,

This has been one of the top questions over the last 10 years.

Sorry to hear you gave up.

Here are the correct solutions:

• Map the data to separate parent-child lists using CAML and connect to Excel (out-of-box, no code needed) - lots of posts on this and multiple YouTube webinars from Qdabra
• Note: Excel 2007 supports binding to a SharePoint list but only if the list created from Excel first (unfortunately, this doesn't work for Excel 2010)
• Note2: for Excel 2010, you can do a parent lookup on the second list and export from that to Excel (manual)
• Map the data to separate parent-child lists using qRules and connect to Excel (third party tool needed, but free trial available) - this is easier and less cost to maintain
• Map the data to SQL using BCS and connect Excel to that
• Note: BCS is a pain and doesn't work for parent-child, but you could flatten the parent
• Map the data to SQL using Qdabra's DBXL Web service and connect to Excel
• Fast and easy - we created this to solve this problem in 2004

Please let us know if you need a flashlight to make it through the forest.