shahine.com/omar/

update: Microsoft has released an add-in to restore this functionality in Excell 2007

As a Program Manager at Microsoft I spend days and days using Sharepoint Lists. It's often very easy and preferable to export a list to Excel and manipulate it there. For example, you can read/write changes in a list and then also crunch data on other sheets like making Pivot Tables and so on.

Well imagine my horror when I learned that the two way sync feature was removed from Excel 2007. A little part of me dies every time I export to excel and then have to manually go and update a sharepoint list. I don't want to use Access to manipulate lists offline, but it appears that's the only option.

Well, I did some searches today and low and behold there is a solution. If you look in the comments in the post I just referenced you will find this:

Hi,

You can have that 2-ways sync functionality back if you install the small free activeX (200K, no dependency whatsoever on anything) available here: http://www.softfluent.com/wsslists.htm.

It reroutes .IQY files associations to itself, so when you click on WSS's "export to spreadsheet" links, it launches Excel 2007, and creates a 2 way sync WSS list (sorry, "table" as the feature has been renamed in the newly created workbook/sheet.

Any questions can be sent to smo (at) softfluent (dot) com.

Simon.

Thank you Softfluent for restoring my productivity.

To make this work on Vista you must launch IE as an administrator, then install the ActiveX Control. Then export your list to excel and when you right click on the table you will see the "Synchronize with SharePoint" button.