Data processing: DingTalk Spreadsheet, an efficient and secure data processing tool

In daily office work, you often need colleagues to help fill in spreadsheets to collect information. Local Excel is commonly used, but during this process, you inevitably run into:

• Format is hard to control. Everyone submits data in a different format.
• When collecting data from multiple people, each person submits a copy. Versions become chaotic, collection takes a long time, and consolidation is difficult.
• You don’t know who hasn’t submitted or who was missed. You have to open Excel files one by one to check.
• It’s hard to follow up on completion status or to push people to finish.

…… When you encounter these issues, give DingTalk Spreadsheet a try. Compared with traditional local Excel, a major advantage of online spreadsheets is collaborative editing, which is especially suitable for scenarios involving multiple people, multiple locations, and multiple departments filling in forms together. Multiple people can edit data together in the spreadsheet, eliminating the need to transfer and consolidate local files repeatedly. This improves data collection efficiency and also helps avoid data errors caused by version chaos.

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DingTalk Spreadsheet: balancing efficient collaboration and data security

DingTalk Spreadsheet supports real-time collaborative editing for more than 500 users at once, along with powerful formula editing and chart drawing features. You can initiate, fill in, track, consolidate, and archive data end-to-end within DingTalk.

• Complete formula and function capabilities for better business data analysis.
• Independent filter views ensure that simultaneous filtering by multiple users does not interfere with each other, allowing personalized data views.
• Cell locking allows only designated users to view or edit, while others cannot view, ensuring data privacy and security.
• Link to addresses, cells, or worksheets — your shortcut to any data with one click.
• Highlight duplicates to quickly spot duplicate entries during input and reduce duplicate records.
• Insert checkboxes, dropdown lists, and date-time fields with one click. Combined with conditional formatting, you can easily build task lists and track task status.

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Alibaba Group data collection case study

Background: The DingTalk Docs product team releases a product update every month, involving more than a dozen products, several teams, and many participants who need to collaborate on the update. Various issues such as missing features and incorrect releases often arise, making collaboration challenging. Now, after more than half a year of using DingTalk Spreadsheet to collect and process information, efficiency has greatly improved. Let’s see how the team uses DingTalk Spreadsheet to collect product update content. @ Mention specific people with one click Before collecting data, organize the rows and columns of the form to ensure that all required information is captured without omissions. Since multiple people are collaborating, you can type @ in the owner cell to select the corresponding person and notify them through the DingTalk chat window.

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Pre-configure formats

When multiple people edit collaboratively, the data collected often varies widely and lacks standardization and structure. Don’t worry — DingTalk Docs supports standardized input formats. Operations staff can set column types based on different fields to standardize formats, such as date, percent, and filter content. This is convenient when collecting ID numbers, phone numbers, and similar data, ensuring user input meets the required format.

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Permission control

After pre-configuring the spreadsheet, you can set permissions as needed. Currently, you can set 4 permission levels for individuals, DingTalk groups, or organizations: “Edit Permission”, “View only”, “View / Download”, and “Hide chat permission”. Publish the spreadsheet to the project collaboration group and grant group members edit permission to quickly collect data.

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Quick entry

Daily tasks pile up, and things can easily slip through the cracks. With @ mention reminders inside the spreadsheet, nothing gets missed. After operations staff @ mention the responsible person in the form, a message notification is sent through the DingTalk chat window. The recipient can open the spreadsheet directly from the chat window and start filling in information immediately.

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Fill in on mobile

Even when you’re away from your computer, the DingTalk Spreadsheet mobile app works well. Open DingTalk Spreadsheet on your phone and select Form view to fill in row by row, so you don’t have to worry about missing or incorrect entries.

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Comment and communicate

With local Excel, communication usually involves screenshots and text, requiring repeated back-and-forth that’s highly inefficient. The cell comment feature in DingTalk Spreadsheet greatly improves communication efficiency. For unclear parts, you can add cell comments. When adding a comment, you can @ mention people directly, or choose to push the comment to specific people for efficient communication.

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Lock important data

During data collection, for some private content you may not want too many people to see, you can set independent permission controls for each cell as needed, achieving fine-grained permission management. If some important data should only be displayed to certain roles, use “Lock Permission” to set different permissions for different roles, ensuring data security.

• Lock edit permission: Lock important data so that only designated users can edit, ensuring data accuracy.
• Lock view permission: Lock sensitive data so that others cannot view it, ensuring data security.

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Insert to-dos

What if the deadline for data collection is approaching but someone still hasn’t completed their entry? With local Excel, you’d have to filter people, open the chat window, and send a reminder — too many steps and a waste of time. With DingTalk Spreadsheet, you can quickly send reminders. DingTalk Spreadsheet supports inserting a to-do for a cell with one click. Through the message notification capability of DingTalk To-Do, you can remind the other party through multiple channels and push them to complete the task.

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View History

Data accuracy is undeniably important. If permission settings provide process control during data collection, then history provides post-event traceability for data. With the cell history feature in DingTalk Spreadsheet, you can grasp the full context of the data and stay fully informed. When data errors occur, you can also pinpoint the respondent precisely and quickly correct mistakes. The cell history feature, as the name suggests, accurately records the edit history of each cell. Even a punctuation mark change can be traced.

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Filter view

If a spreadsheet contains a lot of complex information, it’s easy to lose focus when reviewing and analyzing it. In this case, use the filter view feature to filter out the information you care about and only display that part, making things clearer. This is especially useful when collaborating with external teams. When there’s too much messy content, it’s easy to miss the key points, and some information isn’t relevant to the other party. The traditional approach would be to copy a spreadsheet, remove the unnecessary information, keep only the important parts, and then send it to the collaborator. With DingTalk Spreadsheet, there’s no need for that hassle. Just create a filter view, select the key information, and send it to the other party. They open it and see the filtered results directly — clear and concise — while the action does not affect anyone else using the spreadsheet.

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Pivot Table

P.S. When collecting large amounts of numeric data, use the Pivot Table feature in DingTalk Spreadsheet for analysis. With a simple drag-and-drop, unstructured data can be turned into a pivot table, allowing fast summary and analysis of large-scale data. It easily handles categorization, multi-dimensional display, cross analysis, and more.

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Formula-based analysis

Data analysis cannot do without functions and formulas. The richness of functions and formulas is, to some extent, an important measure of whether an online spreadsheet product is excellent. As of now, DingTalk Spreadsheet supports more than 400 formulas, covering 99% of the functions found in mainstream office software, fully meeting users’ data analysis needs. Select Formula in the toolbar, choose the formula you need, and start your analysis quickly. This includes common data analysis tools such as LOOKUP, VLOOKUP, and MATCH functions.

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