In-depth: How to send Email and SMS Alerts from your MS Excel Spreadsheet

This article describes how to send Email and SMS Alerts from your MS Excel spreadsheet using ipushpull. You can configure your spreadsheet to send alerts whenever user-defined conditions are met. For example, if you work in the financial markets, you may want to be alerted whenever your P&L exceeds a specific limit.

The ‘Getting Started’ guide to alerts can be found here.

Alerts are a paid-for additional feature for Business and Enterprise users only. If you want to try them out please contact us for a trial.

 

Your Alerts Page

You raise alerts by pushing data to a special page in your folder usually called MyAlertsPage and labelled with a Bell symbol. You can only use this page when we have activated alerts for your folder:

 

Raising Alerts

To raise an alert, you have to push data in a specific format from Excel to your Alerts page. You can push data manually or automatically using the ipush(...) function.

The format of the Alerts page is as follows:

Column

Content

Data Type

1

The trigger - has my alert condition been met?

TRUE or FALSE

2

Enable or disable alert completely

TRUE or FALSE

3

Alert message to be sent

Text

4

Comma separated list of emails that the alert should be sent to.

Text

5

Comma separated list of phone numbers that the alert should be SMSed to.

Text

 

For example:

The first column contains the alert Trigger. When this changes from FALSE to TRUE, the alert will be sent. We suggest you use Excel IF() statements in here to define your own alert conditions. For example =IF(C8>D8,TRUE,FALSE) will cause an alert to be raised whenever the value in C8 increases to exceed the value in D8.

The second column lets you enable or disable your alerts. Enter TRUE here to enable the alert or FALSE to disable it. Once again you can use an IF() statement in this column to decide whether to send the alert. For example, you may want to check the time before you send the alert to make sure you don't get woken up in the middle of the night!

The third column is the free-text message that you want to send when the alert is raised.

The fourth column is a comma-separated list of emails the alert should be sent to. Only the email addresses of paid-up members of your folder are valid here.

The fifth column is a comma-separated list of phone numbers the alert should be SMS'd to. Only the numbers of paid-up members of your folder are valid (you can enter phone numbers in your User Settings page). The numbers should be entered in international format, beginning with a plus sign and the country code e.g. +441234567890. You may need to format the cell as Text to prevent Excel treating the phone number as a real number.

 

If you have problems with SMS alerts please read our troubleshooting article.

 

For more information and demo templates please get in touch.


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